


The Mysteries of Marcie Fleach: Chapter 12-The Mechanical Misadventures of Scooby-Fuse

by Sketchpad



Series: The Mysteries Of Marcie Fleach [12]
Category: Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated (TV 2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-08-30 23:04:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8553013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sketchpad/pseuds/Sketchpad
Summary: Two resolute people begin their forays into the winding chaos of time. For Greenman, it's a chance to begin his mighty, pagan plan for Druidism, personal glory...and dark revenge.  For Marcie, it's a dangerous chance to try and save what is most precious to her...the return of Velma Dinkley!





	1. Chapter 1

"What are you guys complaining about?" Marcie asked, after she saw an opening in the weekend traffic, and changed lanes. " _I'm_ the one playing taxi, here."

"Well, I would have made it home after picking up my mom's package from the post office, " Jason told her, sheepishly. "If I...hadn't lost my bus fare through a hole in my pocket."

Red laughed. "I didn't think there was _room_ for a hole, he's so big."

"Oh, yeah?" Jason retorted. "Well, since I saw you picking up a package there, too, I might've ask you for a ride home...if your motorcycle wasn't _towed_ away!"

"Towed?" Daisy responded.

Red blushed around his ears. "Don't worry about it. I'll take care of that," he told her.

Then, he turned his attention back to Jason. "You, however, were obviously confused. I call my _bike_ a hog, I don't carry hogs _on_ it. Ha! Like I'd let you ride my bike, and kill my baby's shocks."

"Stop fighting, you two," Daisy said, sitting next to Marcie, up front. "You two should be grateful that she could drive us where we need to go. There was antique auction that I could've gotten to, by myself, but my car's in the shop. Good thing we all had our cell phones."

She gave a glance in Marcie's direction. "I just hope that this little detour of hers doesn't take _too_ much time."

"Hey, this little _detour_ , as you call it, is the grand opening of a new, cutting-edge research lab in town. I was given my invite on Wednesday, and I waited all week to be there," Marcie defended. "I'm kind of surprised that anybody from the scientific community would know me well enough to give me such and honor, but I won't refuse."

"Ooooh," Red mocked, rolling his eyes. "I'm the Princess of Science. La-di-da!"

Marcie took the jibe in stride, musing aloud, "Princess of Science, hmm? I like the sound of that. Anyway, c'mon, guys. The least you all could do is spare me a few minutes, so I can check this place out, then I'll drop you off wherever you want."

"Where is this place?" Jason asked.

"Just on the other side of downtown, but don't worry, the traffic's fine, so we'll get there, quickly," she said. "It's strange, but the neighborhood it's in sounds sort of familiar."

Daisy glanced over to the backseat, and conversationally asked Red, "By the way, what did you have to pick up from the post office? Probably some new part for your bike, or something."

Red's blush intensified, slightly, as he stammered and muttered an answer, "Uh, yeah. Just another part for my cool bike," while thinking of the item, wrapped in brown paper and too conspicuously large to be for a motorcycle, that was stowed in the front trunk of the Clue Cruiser.

Blocks from the heart of downtown, but still within the periphery of its business district, stood the new laboratory, and when Marcie parked the Cruiser along its clean curb, she studied its architecture, and came to a startling conclusion.

"No wonder the area looked so familiar to me," she said to herself, looking up at the singular design of the building. "This used to belong to Quest!"

Although no one else knew the significance of the location, except, perhaps, Jason, marginally, Marcie knew that she was standing in one of the shadows of a once-great man's legacy.

A Futura-designed edifice, its street-level manufacturing and research floors were high and broad, crowned with a central tower whose more administrative levels were terraced, as it rose, their facades graced with windows that commanded greater and greater views of the town, the further one ascended.

The philosophy of the architecture did not escape Marcie. The building signified the fact that only through the hard work of scientists and laborers on the ground floor, could the soaring and lasting beauty of science and technology come to prominence.

It was a notion that she, herself, appreciated, and one Quest had abandoned in his headlong dive into darkness and scholastic ostracism.

She walked past the building's facade to peer up one of the sides of the tower. Just below the roof, which served as the locus of the building's radio antenna, support shack, and helipad, where the corporate logo, "Quest Research Laboratories," was once written, now displayed a large, stylized, oval sundial, serving as the background to the words, "Sundial Temporal Research Facility."

Marcie couldn't believe it. The enigmatic think tank was finally making a presence in Crystal Cove, but why? And more to the point, she thought, with slight butterflies in her stomach, what did it have to do with her?

"Is this the place?" Daisy asked from the curb. Marcie stood still in quiet rumination. "Marcie!"

Marcie turned her head to the summons, and walked back to the group. "Uh, yeah. This is the place. Cool, huh?"

Red rolled up his eyes, again. "Whoopie."

Marcie went to the front doors and beckoned the others to enter, with a mask of congeniality. "C'mon, guys. Let's see what we can see."

_'So I can get to the bottom of all of this,'_ she thought, anxiously.

The foyer of the lab was spacious, cavernously so, and Marcie could have sworn that it was even larger inside than out.

"Hey, Marcie, Jason. Doesn't this place make you feel homesick?" Red asked, with a snicker.

"What do you mean?" asked Marcie, knowing that a jibe was coming.

"Well, this _is_ a geek factory, isn't it?" Red remarked. "Isn't this where you guys come from?"

"It could be worse, Red," Marcie said, smoothly. "We could be in a zoo."

It took Red a few moments to process that one, but when he finally did, he felt the sting. "Hey!"

Strolling past posted security guards and labyrinthine side corridors, they soon reached the wide kiosk of the main receptionist. A receptionist Marcie couldn't help but recognize.

"Pardon me," she said to the woman. "But didn't I see you in Creationex, one time? Aren't you their receptionist?"

The familiar woman smiled and explained. "Oh, yeah, but since this place opened up, about a month ago, I decided to do a little moonlighting, on the side."

That would have been the end of the matter, but then, she gave Marcie's face another look, and asked, "Wait, are you Marcie Fleach?"

"Yes, I am."

"Do you have your invitation?"

The girl slipped a folded card from her jacket pocket for the receptionist to peruse. It was returned, soon after.

"The Head Director _definitely_ wants to meet with you," the woman told her, almost conspiratorially. "Take the elevator up to the very top floor, then walk to the director's office. Show that card to the secretary, and she'll let you in."

Marcie, taken a bit aback with the cloak and dagger vibe she was getting from everything, said, "Is it okay if I bring my friends along? They were with me when I came here."

"We wouldn't be here, if you'd taken us where we wanted to go," Red muttered under his breath, before receiving an elbow bump to the ribs by Daisy. "What? It's true."

The receptionist gave her friends a practiced, studious look. Years of meeting different people gave her the ability to discern intent from just a gaze into their faces. There was indifference, impatience, and anxiousness, for sure, but not much else. In her built-in polygraph, they posed no immediate threat.

"Okay," she said. "They can go with you. Good luck, up there."

Marcie reflexively thanked her, then wondered, on her way to the elevator, beyond the central kiosk, why the woman had said that.

It only fueled her curiosity, and her anxiousness, as she and the other stepped into the car and ascended.

* * *

The elevator doors parted to a familiar scene for Marcie. Another tastefully appointed corridor stretching out before her, leading her, once again, to the office at the end, that, ultimately, hid the true master of affairs that she found herself surrounded by.

The group stepped out and walked past flanking satellite offices adorned with pictures of Sundial's history, on the walls.

Apologetic, deal making, German scientists standing next to a large, bell-shaped conveyance, alongside other scientists from other Allied countries who shared a similar technological dream.

The pictures of awkward first tests, eccentric financial backers, and so forth, led to the photo of Sundial's engineers, finally, standing proudly around the prototype of the Hour Tower, the stabilizing power source and reality-warping technology that bent space-time to their collective will, albeit, slightly.

Except for unforeseen growing pains that caused them to accidentally pull figures from their eras, like the Slag Brothers, The Red Max, and The Ant-hill Mob, the dream of scientific exploration via time travel was developing apace, culminating, dubiously, in the now destroyed, stolen, and cannibalized prototype of the T.H.R.O.B.A.C.-Tampered History Rectifying Observational Base And Combatant.

This gradual, visual path through Sundial's evolution eventually ended at the desk of the head director's secretary, who sat calmly, yet kept a wary eye on these newcomers.

"Do you have an appointment?" she asked, more as a matter of course, than as a legitimate question. She doubted that they had any true reason to be here.

Marcie stepped forward from the rest and handed the woman her card.

"Fleach. Party of four," she quipped.

The secretary gave a dispassionate look through the card, looked back at this motley crew of youngsters, and said, with a nod, "Go on in. The Head Director will see you now."

Marcie couldn't help but detect something ominous in that, but she led the way to the brass-handled, polished wood door that wore a matching brass plaque that said simply, "Head Director."

She knocked and waited for permission to enter. A voice from within bid them to do so.

Dominated by a window that stretched the width of the already wide room, the office was warm and plush without the décor being too distracting for work. The director's desk sat centrally in front of the window, like an alter, yet its chair was already turned around to face it.

There were two chairs before the desk, as well. One, occupied by someone who didn't turn to regard the new guests, so Marcie took the other, while the rest of her friends took a couch and another chair that sat in the corners of the room.

Marcie heard a snort of derision from the figure seated across from her, as soon as she sat down, prompting her to notice the man sitting in the other chair. She gasped quietly at the recognition.

"Maynard Spring?" she blurted out.

" _Doctor_ Maynard Spring, to _you_ ," he corrected, huffily.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. "I thought you were rotting in jail after Sundial fired you for what you did to them and The Wacky Racers."

"I was, thanks to you," the erstwhile Sundial employee muttered in her direction. "Luckily, Sundial was still able to see my genius through my past…indiscretions, and ask for my help in a most delicate matter. One that, unfortunately, you have a part in."

"What do you mean? What do I have to do with anything?"

"Heh! You'll see," he said, with a sly smirk. "You haven't met my ex-boss, yet, have you?"

"This Head Director? No, I haven't."

The smirk deepened. "Funny. He couldn't stop talking about your and his little fishing trip. Particularly about the one that... _almost_ got away."

The gears in her mind were running with past associates. Then, a notion came to her, one so out-of-left field, that she almost laughed in incredulity.

"No..."

The desk's chair suddenly turned slowly to face the guests, revealing a frail, silent, old man in a business suit, breathing feebly from an oxygen mask.

"Oh," Marcie sighed in relief. The notion would have been unthinkable, otherwise.

The man's desk, however, was as broad, as it was wide, and so, she was unprepared when the unthinkable, who was hidden from her point of view, popped his head up, and gave Marcie a knowing smile.

"Hello, Marcie," Schrödinger the cat purred, smugly. "I told you that we'd certainly see each other, again."

Marcie was, for lack of a better word, flabbergasted.


	2. Chapter 2

"Whoa!" Red screamed. "That...that cat just... _talked_! Cats don't talk! _Cats don't talk!_ "

"I suppose, to you, they can't dance, either," Schrödinger said to him. "But, here I am, although I won't dance for you. I do have my pride, after all."

"Whoa!" Red repeated. "Are you guys _hearing_ this?"

"You're like that Rodgers kid's dog!" Daisy exclaimed, as well as she could without getting too emotional from this revelation, which was proving difficult. "I _knew_ I heard him say something to him, one time. Something about a buffet, but my folks said that I was hearing things. Wait! Are you like that parrot I keep seeing in those Creationex commercials? I mean, does he _know_ what he's saying, or do they teach him to say his lines?"

"I don't know, dear," he deadpanned. "When I see him again, I'll ask him."

Next, it was Jason's turn to throw a rattled question to the cat. "A-Are you an experiment of this organization? A robot, perhaps? I-I'm pretty good with machines, that's why I ask. If you _are_ a device, let me say that you're incredibly lifelike."

Schrödinger gave the portly teen a sarcastic smile and turned his accidentally backhanded compliment inside-out. "How nice! I was about to say the same thing about you."

"Hold it, guys," Marcie told the rest of the gang, and then turned back to the cat, eager to get her questions answered. "Are you the director's cat? Is that why you had to leave me, that night at the park?"

"My, don't we sound jealous," Schrödinger said, cocking his head playfully to the side. "Actually, I had to finish my investigation on the phenomenon that's currently over your town, and in any event, he's not, technically, my owner. As if anyone could _ever_ own me, dear girl."

Schrödinger hopped onto the desk from the man's lap, and made his introductions.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am Schrödinger," the cat said, pleasantly. " _Mr._ Schrödinger, if it will help you relax, and this master conversationalist, here, is the esteemed Dr. Avery Moon, one-time Head Director of the temporal think tank, Sundial. He's my host's owner, or rather; he _was_ , until they both had an unfortunate meeting with a moving vehicle, some years back."

Marcie shook her head. "I don't understand."

"This man was the foremost thinker in temporal physics until the car accident left him a mere shadow of himself. I, being somewhat of a geek, myself, possessed the body of his erstwhile pet, and convinced the administrative board to let Avery continue being director in name, while I ran things in secret."

"Host? Possession?" Jason asked, fearful that the more he learned, the deeper into this weird world he found himself, as if sinking into quicksand.

"So, you're telling me," Marcie said, incredulously. "That the world's leading think tank in temporal engineering and theory is headed by...a Siamese cat?"

Schrödinger did his best to shrug, nonchalantly. "Well, to be honest, it _was_ a tough pitch, at first, but when I gave them a taste of my eons-old, interdimensional know-how on the subject, they welcomed me with open arms and bowls of milk."

Everything the cat presented as an explanation only made Marcie ask more questions, the most pressing, being, "Who... _are_ you?"

"We are the Annunaki," said a soothing, feminine voice.

Before anyone could ask who had said that, a youthful looking, female Cocker Spaniel padded from around the rear of the desk and sat by it, giving everyone a look from her wide, friendly eyes.

"Now, Schrödinger," she admonished him, gently. "You shouldn't be so mean to them. You've been on this world long enough to know what humans' reactions will be when they see us talk."

"Nova?" Daisy gasped. "You can speak, _too_?" The dog nodded.

Red asked, "You know that...dog, Daisy?"

"She belongs to the Jones'," she explained. "I sometimes saw her with that Freddy guy, whenever he'd come over to see Daphne. But, I never heard her speak. Not once!"

"Annunaki," mused Marcie. The word was familiar enough to spark the scholar in her. "You're one of the gods of Mesopotamian legend?" she asked.

"Although we have been the basis of much of your species' folklore and mythology, we're no legend, Marcie." Nova chuckled, with a wan, enigmatic smile. She looked to the others. "Nor are we experiments, Jason, or trained animals, Daisy."

"How do you know our names?" Red asked, suspiciously. "Are you some kind of magic, or something?"

"No, Red," she answered, simply. "Security monitored your conversation in the elevator, on the way up."

Nova walked back around to the rear of the desk, hopped onto Dr. Moon's lap, and then bounded onto the top of the desk, where she sat next to Schrödinger, and could more comfortably address the guests at an approximate eye-level.

"We are a race of cosmic, interdimensional beings," she continued. "And have been interacting with humanity for millennia, thanks, every thousand years, to a cosmic event called Nibiru, whereby the barrier between your dimension and ours becomes weak enough for us to cross over."

"Call it interdimensional slumming, if you will," Schrödinger slyly added.

"Are you all talking animals?" Jason found himself asking.

Nova shook her head. "We exist without form. When we come to you, we either inhabit animal hosts, like we have, or you may encounter one of our descendants, animals who have mastered the power of speech, or other abilities, because it was passed down to them when one of us and another animal loved each other."

"Like I said," Schrödinger purred. "Slumming."

"Schrödinger!" Nova chastised.

"In any case," he sighed. "Even though we're pretty neutral bunch when it comes to most cosmic affairs, some of us thought that you humans could actually make something of yourselves, in the grand scheme of things. So, whenever Nibiru occurred, some of us would stay and help you along. However, every bunch, occasionally, has a few bad apples in it, and those Annunaki would spend their time trying to keep you in The Stone Age, or worse. Something to do with fear that humanity would surpass us one day, or some such rot. Personally, I think it was just a hobby."

"You mean, there are good and bad whatever-you-ares, where you come from?" Red asked.

"Yes, but that is not the issue, here." Nova said. "What brings us together, now, is the need to address a great injustice that was done to one group of people in our desire to reward the great deeds of another."

"What do you mean?" Marcie asked.

"Remember when the imminent Dr. Spring, here, stole our T.H.R.O.B.A.C. from us?" Schrödinger reminded her. "Well, ironically enough, it _was_ going to be used here in this town."

"Why?"

"For a few months, now, Sundial's been monitoring a growing disruption in the space-time continuum over Crystal Cove. Our first clue was a temporal displacement of five time signatures in the area, for just a few microseconds."

"What happened?" asked Jason.

"Well, to put it simply, in deference to your red-headed friend in the back," Dr. Spring joined in, smarmily. "Something came into this timeline and knocked something _else_ out of it."

"Really?" Marcie asked, intrigued by the notion of such a dramatically scientific thing happening in their little Californian town, and the sheer probability of it occurring, at all. "Like what?"

"Well, that's the odd thing," Spring continued. "According to our instruments, the T-signatures, or Time signatures, for you laymen, were of four human beings-two male, two female, and a large animal, possibly a dog."

Schrödinger glanced over at Nova, who now held an air of uncomfortable quiet around her.

"Yep," Spring said, indifferently. "Apparently, it looked like some suckers were knocked out of this time period by some sort of alternate version of them."

While it took the rest of the gang time to try and process things like temporal theory, Marcie mused, quickly. "Alternate version. You mean, like, in alternate timeline? An alternate _universe_?"

Schrödinger attempted to shrug. "According to most theories, six of one, half-dozen of the other."

"How did this happen?"

Spring, again, glanced to the people in back of her. "Again, in deference to the brain trust behind you. Everything in a given universe is touched by time. You, me, City Hall. Everything. Now, imagine the universe as a finished jigsaw puzzle. Everyone and everything is in its proper place in time. Now, imagine someone taking similar pieces from another puzzle, another _universe_ , and trying to cram them into this universe's puzzle. Some of our puzzle pieces might just pop out. That's the temporal displacement that's causing the temporal disruption over town."

"Well, who were these extra pieces, these copy-cats?" she asked the cat.

Schrödinger had to chuckle at that. "Copy-cats. I like that. Anyway, my _purr-_ view is more into the technological. If you want to know who they were, specifically, then I yield the floor to my canine compatriot, who may shed more _metaphysical_ light on the subject, then I."

All eyes then fell on the Spaniel, as Nova asked, reluctantly, "Remember when Schrödinger mentioned that there are good and evil Annunaki? Well, among our number, there existed the most evil of our race. His name, alone, was so abhorrent to us, that we simply called him The Evil Entity."

Daisy shrugged, self-consciously, not liking the direction this conversation was going. No good ever came from discussions about great and ancient evil. "Nothing subtle about that, I guess."

"Or about him," Nova continued. "Worlds were once his playthings, as were the poor souls who inhabited them, and like a cruel child who tired of his toys, he would wipe them out, leaving depopulated flotsam orbiting dead stars. Despite our people's neutrality, we, on the side of Good, rose up and pursued him across dimensions, and fought him mightily throughout the eons, until, finally, when he decided to punish our meddling by coming to a universe that harbored humans, like you, we acted.

We used the humans there as bait, and when he arrived to strike, we struck first, and captured our quarry, driving him into a sarcophagus, a prison of our own making, to seal him and his evil away from all of creation, forever. Our jubilation could felt all the way to our home dimension."

"Oh, yes. We partied well and hearty, that night. Remember the slumming?" Schrödinger reminisced, with a rakish wink.

"Wait, you just _caught_ him?" Red asked, now getting absorbed into Nova's epic story. "Why didn't you, y'know, get rid of the guy, if he was giving you so much grief?"

Nova lowered her head in sad reminiscence. "That was our intent, young one, but as powerful as we are, we could not escape censure. Our elders, older even than some universes, decreed that since we displayed such blatant favoritism towards the side of Good, the balance of neutrality had to be restored.

As a result, although we defeated The Evil Entity, the sarcophagus would have to remain on that Earth, where his foul influence had already begun to take root, twisting that world into a dark reflection of your own, full of harsh intrigues, and served by generational pawns who thought they were solving mysteries to make the world a better place, but instead, were unwittingly seeking the key to his release."

"Whoa," the gang said in unison. Harsh intrigues, indeed.

"Thus," said Nova. "The Evil Entity, finally, succeeded with a young group of mystery-solvers who called themselves, _Mystery Incorporated_ , who lived in a Crystal Cove, very much like yours. They, eventually, understood the trick, by which, The Entity had ensnared them, and so many others, over the centuries, and struck back.

"In the end, even against the destruction of their town, and the deaths of all they held dear, they did what even _we_ could not, and destroyed him, utterly."

"Whoa! What happened next?" Jason asked, now riveted on every word.

"Those heroes gave proof to our belief, that humanity did have the strength, the will, and the character to one day become as we were, elevated to the cusp of a new level of being, to take their hard-earned place in the heavens. The whole of our race were so moved by their sacrifice, that we granted them a singular gift. They would happily live out their days, in an untouched Crystal Cove, free of The Entity or his influence, and surrounded by those who loved them. "

"So what happened to them?" Marcie asked. "It's a small town. I haven't seen anyone new here."

Nova, once again, gave an enigmatic smile. "Oh, but you have. In fact, some of _you_ have already met some of _them_."

Marcie gave a frown of thought, as she pondered hard on who she might have talked to, that long ago. Then, a thunderbolt of sickening possibility struck through her.

She shook her head, not wanting to believe how deeply she had been mistaken, or for how long. "Wait a minute! _Four_ people...and an _animal_? _Them_? No!"

Daisy, concerned, spoke up. "Who? Who is she talking about, Marcie?"

Marcie was too stunned to acknowledge her friend. "I...I thought I knew who I was talking to," she muttered to herself. "But, who _was_ I talking to? If that wasn't my Velma...then where _is_ she?"

Schrödinger sighed and padded quietly to the distraught girl. "Who can say? The universe has a way of balancing itself out when it needs to. They could have been shunted in time, but not in space, to a point, in the past, probably, when Mystery Incorporated hadn't arrived, yet."

Despite all of the impossible things that she had just heard, and from whom, a spark of hope ignited in Marcie's eyes. "You mean, they could still be in Crystal Cove, just not in the same time?"

The cat canted his to the side. "Possibly. All I do know is that this Mystery Incorporated may not have meant to do it, but they left an awfully big mess behind. They left town, and been on the move ever since we picked up the anomaly. However, we have been tracking their unique T-signatures, everywhere they go."

Marcie covered her eyes, for fear that an errant tear might betray her emotions, and took a deep breath to recover, saying, "Okay, let me see if I have straight. You guys are cosmic beings who look like animals and have been helping humans for a long time. You defeated your greatest evil, but had to leave him on an alternate Earth, where he corrupted everything and tricked some amateur detectives, one of whom is an alternate version my Velma Dinkley, into helping him escape. When he did escape, they destroyed him, and you guys felt so sorry for them, that you brought them here, but by doing so, you knocked _my_ Velma and four of her friends out of this time period. Have I missed anything, so far?"

The Siamese shook his head. "Not really. Why?"

"Because I want to know what I have to do," Marcie said, with faith...and iron, in her voice. "To bring my Velma back."


	3. Chapter 3

Schrödinger was unusually loud in his brazen laughter at Marcie. "You? Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"What's so funny, _cat_?" Marcie asked, her voice, a touch steely.

"Sorry for the laughter," Schrödinger said, recovering from his incredulous mirth. "In fact, I've forgot to thank you for your help in trying to keep our technology out of the hands of people like Benton Quest, but we only told you all this...so you could be our messenger."

Marcie's mind went blank for a second, then rebooted. She couldn't believe that she was hearing this. "Velma's lost somewhere in the past, and you want me to play Western Union?"

"Now, don't get upset, Marcie," the cat entreated, giving her a lop-sided, self-conscious smile. "I just wanted you to come over, so we could tell you what happened and what's happen _ing_ , so you, in turn, could tell the families of the displaced why they might never see their loved ones again, if we fail to bring them back, that's all. I didn't expect you to bring guests with you, but that's what this is really about."

Marcie revised her earlier feelings. She couldn't believe what she was hearing, _now_ , especially due to the blasé attitude he was giving on the matter.

"Did you hear yourself, just now?" she asked him. "Look, if you're worried about my family missing me, it's okay. My mother left me… _again_ , and I basically ran away from my father. We're all scattered to the four winds, right now. All I have, that feels right to me, is this chance. If I can make this happen, then please, you have to give it to me."

"We can't, Marcie," the cat said. "Believe me when I tell you that the universe knew what it was doing when it put your Velma and her friends into the past. If you somehow bring them back to their proper time _before_ Mystery Incorporated completes its quest to reach Miskatonic University, you will undo all that we did for them. They would be shunted back into their own timeline."

"You already know where they're going? Well, I don't care about that, them, or their little road trip," Marcie said, perhaps a little too cold and bluntly even for her. "I just want the real Velma to come back, and things put back the way they were. Those knock-offs don't even belong in our universe, according to you two."

"Just wait until they fulfill their new destiny on this world," Nova offered. "And then we will devote the whole of our resources into bringing your friends back. Besides, their parents deserve to know the truth. It would be unfair for them to live out their lives under the false hope of their children's return."

An ache from that false hope throbbed within Marcie, as she looked accusingly at the feline. "So, you brought me here under false _pretenses_? I think you've been a cat too long, Schro."

"No," Nova said, matter-of-factly. "Actually, he's always like this."

"Besides, I trust you to do this," Schrödinger added. "You saved my life, when we first met, in Ocean Land. That was impressive in its own right, but you also showed me that you had a good head on your shoulders, as well, and I like that."

Although that was suppose to be a sincere compliment from him, Marcie frowned. It was bad enough that he wouldn't let her rescue Velma, but now, in her mind, he was being pleasantly condescending about it.

_'Why, you...I'm not your puppet, you pompous, little space cat!'_ Marcie thought, bitterly. _'I'll show you what a righteously indignant human can do!'_

"So, you like that I have a good head on my shoulders, huh?" she asked. "Then, you're gonna love this."

Marcie slowly got up from her chair and walked towards Daisy. She, then stopped, and said to her, "Daisy, there's a very good chance that your sister, Daphne, was one of the displaced that he's talking about."

Now, it was Daisy's mind's turn to go blank, before she yelped, "Wh-What? My...baby sister's one of these... _people_ he's talking about? You mean, she's not here?"

"I don't think so," Marcie said coolly, even though it hurt her to see her friend like this. "Apparently, you'll have to wait, like me, until their Chosen Ones finish their excursion, out there. I just hope it doesn't take _too_ long, and they do find her for you. But, if they can't, and you tell your parents about all of this, I'll corroborate whatever you say, if they don't believe you."

Leaving Daisy just as distraught as she was, Marcie turned to the cat's direction, darkly triumphant. "See what a good head I've got, Schrödinger? I just cut my work load in half."

Schrödinger glowered at her and stewed. He knew it was her attack on him for turning her down, but he believed that his decision was fair and altruistic, no matter how disappointing it sounded to others who couldn't see his big picture.

"How long have they got to go on this quest of theirs?" Daisy asked, tersely.

The two Annunaki glanced at each other, uncomfortably. "Like I said," Schrödinger spoke up. "We're tracking them. They're close to their destination, but it might be a few more weeks before they reach the place."

Although seeing the two animals being put on the spot by Daisy was, in and of itself, gratifying, the request to wait, alone, was galling to Marcie, and she already didn't give a tinker's cuss about these doppelgangers, to begin with.

"So, why me?" she asked the cat.

Schrödinger sighed. "Because you knew the displaced personally."

_'Barely,'_ she thought.

"And how would you know _that_?" she asked, again. "Your strange Annunaki powers?"

"No," Nova said. "Because, although you were closer to your Velma, her other friends, like Fred, knew you, mainly, through her, and I have often heard him speak of you in the most... _marginal_ of terms."

"Oh," Marcie said, quietly. A fifth wheel in the gang, as she long deduced.

Off to one side of the room, a small shelf clock chimed softly, alerting Schrödinger. He gave a quick glance at the time, and decided to end this meeting, forthwith. There were things that needed doing, and it wouldn't do for the head of a think tank devoted to the mysteries of Time to be late in doing them.

He walked back from the edge of the desktop, sat on its center, and raised his head, like an Egyptian sphinx, proclaiming a commandment.

"Miss Fleach, Miss Blake, I'm truly sorry about all of this." Schrödinger intoned, with frosty professionalism. "Please know that we are going to do everything we can to bring them back. That is my solemn promise to you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a lot to prepare today."

"Uh, sir, will you be starting testing on the Mark II?" Doctor Spring asked the cat, deferentially, knowing that it was time to leave, himself. "One of the conditions to my release was that I was to help with the design of the Mark II, after all. I admit that it's not as big, or flashy, as the first, but there's no sense in it not working."

_'Mark II?'_ Marcie thought, curiously.

The new Head Director regarded his ex-employee. "That will be all, Dr. Spring. See our guests to the elevator, and then, report to Lab D to run a thorough diagnostic on the Bloodhound System."

"Yes, sir."

Maynard got up, as Marcie began to walk in the direction of the office door, signaling to the others that this meeting was, more or less, over.

"You'll understand, Marcie," Schrödinger called out to Marcie, perhaps, as a last chance to mend the rift that grew between them. "You're my friend."

" _I_ thought you were _mine_ ," Marcie quietly said, in parting.

* * *

"Well, _that_ was a hoot," Red grumbled, while the gang marched casually towards the floor's elevator, under the apathetic escort of Dr. Spring.

"Y'know, the socio-historical significance of the presence of these Annunaki is very profound. "Jason said, in an attempt to raise spirits.

"Yeah," Red sarcastically agreed. "I liked the talking zoo, back there, myself, but now we need to get back to reality before some canary decides to have a chat with us, here, in Geekenstein Castle."

"But, they were _real_ , _talking_ _animals_ , Red. You've gotta admit, that was pretty cool," Jason continued. "I mean, they said that they were helping us, but begs the question. Just how much have _we_ done, as a species? Did we invent the light bulb, ourselves, or do we have _them_ to thank? What do you think, Marcie?"

Marcie's normally cogent eyes, were like lead beads. Angry indifference created by a deep frustration, muted the scholar within her. She _did_ , however, give Jason a disinterested glance, in response.

"I think that the Ancient Alien Astronaut Gang are going to love that," she muttered.

She had expected either depressed silence from the gang, or else, another feeble try at lightening the mood with conversation. What she heard, instead, was a low chuckle from Maynard Spring.

"Oh, don't mind your friend," the doctor told her friends, mockingly. "She's just like that, because the Annunaki won't let her play hero."

That pricked at her, as they reached the elevator. Daisy pushed the button to call the car up, while Marcie glowered at the man.

"You wouldn't understand what being a hero _is_ , convict," she defended. The doors opened, and they all got in.

Spring, closest to the control panel, pressed the button to the ground floor and casually leaned against the wall, subtly keeping his eyes on Marcie, and gauging her reactions.

"Nice performance, back there, by the way," he complimented her.

"What are you talking about, you jailbird?" she responded, then wondered why on Earth was she even talking to him. It was obvious that he was needling her, as payback for what she helped do to him, months past.

"I never saw someone so willing to throw herself into the fire like that," he said, smoothly. "You don't know what could happen to you in the time vortex."

"Can't be as bad as me having to tell all of those parents that their kids aren't coming home, if you can't get it together," Marcie said. "By the way, how _are_ you guys going to try and get them back, anyway?"

"Hello!" Dr. Spring told her, flippantly. " _Time travel think tank_? We've got the Mark II already built. We just have to get a crew together."

"What's the Mark II?" Marcie asked, her curiosity getting ahead of her.

"The next version of the T.H.R.O.B.A.C. Tampered History Rectifying Observational Base And... _Conveyor_!"

"I thought that it stood for Tampered History Rectifying Observational Base And Combatant," she said.

"Well, we had to rename it," Spring admitted, with a noncommittal shrug. "After what happened with the first model, it was decided that it was far too weaponized and confrontational, with the whole "Combatant" thing. So, we made a kinder, gentler time machine. It looks like one of those tea cup rides in the county fair, only bigger, and much more high-tech."

"Have your people tested this Mark II before?"

"Of course. We're _always_ testing," he told her. "We've sent out probes, and even animals, on occasion." He, then, gave a sly smirk. "I'd show you all of the "Before and After" pictures, but I don't know if you've eaten lunch, yet."

Ignoring his intimidation and running into another wall of frustration, Marcie muttered, "Figures, but why do you care? In fact, why am I even talking to you? The convention center you almost trashed is just down the street. If you had your way, I'd be a corpse in a crater in the middle of the street."

"Things change, Marcie," Spring said, with some oiliness. "I'm a changed man. Rotti-uh, I mean, _spending_ time in jail, allowed me to think long and hard on my transgressions. You asked me, "Why do I care?" I think the better question is, "What if I told you that I could make it happen? Get you on the fast track...to the past?""

Although the rest of the gang had no intention of even thinking of going off on this foolhardy, if not, incredibly dangerous escapade, the skepticism they gave off around Spring was as thick as the cables of the elevator car.

To them, he sounded like a dangerous used-car salesman, spinning sweet logic into whatever words his target, Marcie, desperately wanted to hear, and everyone around him had to wonder what his angle was.

"Uh, forgive me for saying this, sir, but you were in jail," Jason interjected, meekly. "Why should we believe anything you say?"

Red had to concur. "Yeah. Jellyfish is right. Why _shouldn't_ we think you're shady?"

The elevator doors opened to the cavernous main lobby, once more, and they all disembarked.

However, instead of Jason's feared offense, the doctor gave an air of amiable calm. "That's a fair point, the two of you," he said. "But, as you can see, I'm not in jail, now. Plus, I can help your friend. I still have some access to Sundial's equipment and labs."

He turned his pitch back to Marcie. "Mind you, my access is a bit out-dated, since the arrest, but I can get you close, Marcie, sooo _close_ to what you want! You can finally save your friends!"

"Friend," Marcie corrected him, stonily.

"Oh, okay, then," he amended. "Friend. Whatever. What's your answer?"

She had no reason to listen, let alone, believe anything he was saying. But the thought of not trying to get Velma back, of not grabbing any and every opportunity that presented themselves, of surrendering under the agonizing feeling of loss if she did nothing, battered against the bulwark of her common sense.

_'He tried to kill me, after all,'_ she thought.

_'But, that was in the past,'_ her desire argued. _'Know the truth. You will never see V, again, if you turn your back on this.'_

With her skepticism crumbling under Spring's soft and constant erosion, Marcie said, under her breath, "I...I don't know..." It was the same as saying "yes" to him, she knew.

"Well, I suggest that you better know within three hours," he warned her.

Daisy heard a sense of urgency in Spring's pitch, raising her already high suspicions of him. "She shouldn't go along with any of this crap, to start with, but what's the hurry, if she only has three hours?"

"Because that's when Schrödinger starts supervising the Mark II's next test launches," Spring explained. "After that, if successful, we start the selection process for the crew."

He regarded Marcie, again. "But, I can sneak you in early, and prep the Mark II for take-off, myself, _before_ the tests."

Unbidden by her sense of self-preservation, a flame of hope, suddenly, bloomed deep in Marcie's eyes, as the siren song of a successful rescue seductively drew her along. "You...You can do that? By yourself?"

Inside, Spring's smile beamed. He knew that this little four-eyed fish was hooked. Now, was the time to reel her in with gentle finesse. "I helped design it, remember? In particular, I designed...the Bloodhound System."

"What's that?" Marcie asked. "I heard Schrödinger mention that before we were shown the door."

"Probably the most crucial piece of equipment any time machine could have," the doctor boasted. "Remember when I said everyone and everything is touched by time? Well, time leaves a fingerprint on everything, a unique energy signature that can be tracked. That's the T-signature. When we, eventually, send our crew of Chrononauts into the vortex, there will always be the chance that they might get lost, stranded in the past, or future. The Bloodhound System is a powerful sensor and computerized tracking unit that locks-on to the crew's recorded T-sigs, so it can pinpoint when in time they are, to mount a rescue."

"Just like what I want," she whispered to herself.

"Exactly. Even though, after my arrest, they confiscated my preliminary schematics of the device, the plans to build the system's key components are locked up tight in my brain. That's why they arranged for my release, despite the warden's rather vocal misgivings. I wouldn't help them, otherwise."

"So," Daisy quipped. "They sprung the Spring, huh?"

"Quite," he chuckled. "So, what do you say, Marcie? You practically shouted to the rooftops that no one will miss you. You'd be free and clear to effect your own rescue."

He, then looked at her as innocently as he could, and said, with the falsest of sagacity, "But, then again, it's your call."

Everyone reached the building's glassy main entrance, but Marcie decided to lean against one of the glass doors' surrounding windows, in thought, replaying in her mind every declaration she said to Schrödinger and Nova. They knew her rebellious mind on the subject, and would be wary of her, now, if she sought to defy them.

A black tempest of disdain stirred in Marcie's heart, and any fond thoughts she might have harbored for her friendship with Schrödinger was cut down, swiftly.

_'Who are these creatures to tell_ me _what to do, and who not to save?'_ she thought, icily _. 'They caused this mess, to begin with!'_

The chance to save Velma was comically within her reach, and these cosmic so-and-so's wanted her to sit on the sidelines, on _their_ say-so.

What if a glitch happened and the mission was scrubbed, dooming Velma to whenever she was, with no way to get back to her family who loved and missed her?

What if, somehow, Marcie actually had something to bring to the table to rescue her, but backed down from it, simply because she was told not to do it? Could she bear to live the rest of her life under a metric ton of "What-if's" and the shame of her own indecisiveness?

She knew that to agree to Spring would be like making a deal with the scientific devil, but time was ticking away, as they both well knew, so, she finally came to a decision. One, as hard, icy and crystalline as her best Insta-Ice capsule. She sighed, turned to the others, and said her peace.

"I'm not speaking for any of you, guys," Marcie said, feeling as if she was going to her own execution. "But, I have to do this. If Spring can help me find Velma and the others, I can't ignore that. So, I guess, Daisy, I'm counting on you to be _my_ messenger."

"I'll tell my folks, if worse come to worse, but who do you want me to tell?" Daisy asked, solemnly.

She was about to tell Daisy to notify her father, but she stopped herself and sighed at that notion. The chances were high that Winslow was, probably, still angry at her for running away, and wouldn't believe what was told to him, anyway.

"Tell Mr. and Mrs. Dinkley what happened to me," Marcie instructed. "If anything bad _should_ happen." She, then turned back to Spring.

"Okay, _Doctor_ Spring," she acquiesced, with a heavy sigh. "I'll do it. I don't trust you, of course. You did try to get rid of me, after all, but I'll do it. But, know this. If you rig this system of yours to give false readings, and something happens to me, I'll make it my mission to see that the next time you return to this year, again, it'll be at your wake."

Despite the example of Causality being skewed by that threat, inwardly, Spring was impressed at the iron this nerdy girl could summon. No doubt, she was determined, but she was, also, angry. He knew that he would have to capitalize on that anger to hide his true motives.

"Yikes," he said, sarcastically. "Then, I guess I better do a bang-up job, huh? The problem is, since I don't have your friends' t-sigs, I can't input them into the Bloodhound, so you can't find them. Heh! You would have risked life and limb for nothing, I guess. Oh, well."

In Marcie's discouragement, she could already see the vision of Velma slipping further and further away into the dark, misty torrent of history. She began to think, hard, remembering everything said to her, today, and trying to tie it together into a solid plan.

It wasn't long before the spark of an actual plan soon hit her. "Wait," she said. "You said everyone has a time signature." He shook his head.

"Could a _piece_ of someone still have this signature?" she, hopefully, asked

"Huh?" Red uttered, having trouble following this new development, as well as the rest of this scientific conversation. "What are you talking about, Mar?

Marcie pressed. "Could a piece of my friends carry this signature, too? Like, uh, a strand of hair, or a toe nail clipping. Could the Bloodhound home in on that?"

Spring considered, genuinely stroking his chin in thought. "Hmm...Intriguing. When I worked at Sundial, we never thought of locking onto objects like those for a t-signature. If you could gather these bits and pieces of your friends, before the deadline, and the Bloodhound's sensors can...catch their scent, as it were, it could very well work. Might have to tweak the sensitivity a bit, but it might just work."

He took out a Sundial business card, turned it on its back, and wrote down a phone number. "That's my cell phone number. If anything comes up before we leave, call me so we can try again, later."

"How will I get back in?" Marcie asked. "Won't security stop me?"

Maynard glanced in the receptionist's direction. "I'll tell the receptionist to let you back in when you return, and I'll have a spiffy uniform all picked out for you."

"Thanks."

"Oh, by the by," Spring added, conversationally. "Do you have any way of getting _to_ your precious friends, once you've found them?"

"One thing at a time, Doctor," Marcie muttered, already considering such things as, severe cultural differences, accidental, anachronistic financial transactions, and the very real and troubling risk of timeline pollution. "Rome wasn't conquered in a day."

"Don't you mean built, Marcie?" Jason corrected.

Marcie glanced back at him. "No."

* * *

It was quiet inside the Clue Cruiser when it putted into the parking lot of the Crystal Cove Convention Center.

Marcie couldn't help but feel a pang of distressing nostalgia when she looked at the center and its neighborhood. This was the site of a chaotic, yet victorious battle between Dr. Spring, armed with a stolen T.H.R.O.B.A.C, the Wacky Racers, and the unlikely assistance of a newly motorized Really Rottens.

Now, here she was, listening to the same man who cause all of that chaos, in the first place, very likely setting her up for even more of his trouble.

As she stopped the engine, Marcie contented herself, sullenly, that because of her impatience, according to the two cosmic beings, and her previous bout of indecision, which was her belief, if it did come to ruin for her, due to Spring, at least, the others would learn from her example, and be safe to wait it out.

"Okay, Daisy," Marcie said. "Here you are. I think you still have time to reach the auction."

Daisy had been introspective the whole trip, saying nothing, along with the rest of them, but very deep in thought. She stepped out of the car and looked at the center's side entrance as if in a dream, slowed because of a debate that raged within her. A debate whose conclusion helped _her_ reach a conclusion.

"Uh, I don't think that I'll be going in, guys," she said, hesitantly, her inner self going through the trance-like feeling of doing something that she knew she probably couldn't undo. Like taking that one, momentous step off of a cliff.

Marcie glanced in surprise at her. "How come?"

Daisy sat back in the front passenger seat and closed the door. "Uh, I've been thinking about...some things. Y'know, before any of you knew me, I was a slacker."

The sarcastic looks on her friends' faces made her quickly revise her earlier confession.

"Never mind. Anyway," she muttered. "I don't know why, but for some reason, the other sisters and I just wouldn't apply ourselves to most things. So, all our lives, teachers, friends, and worse, _family_ , told us that we were just lay-abouts and wouldn't amount to anything. That might have been true, but those words still hurt.

"And then, it got worse when little Daphne hit the scene. Straight-A student, honor roll, head cheerleader," she sighed. "They say that every family's got their favorite, and ours was Daph.

"It wasn't her fault that me and the other sisters were always being compared to her, but we just kept hearing how much better she was than us, to the point where we, eventually, got numb to it. But, deep inside, we were still feeling something after all of that. Resentment.

"Every time our folks paraded Daphne's accomplishments in front of us, it just made us feel so small. It made us feel..." Shame made Daisy avert her youthful face from the others. "Angry at our little sister.

She wiped at her watering eyes. "Heck, it got to the point where we didn't even care that she was going to marry her steady, Fred Jones, or that she wound up running away with him.

"But, apparently," she said, sadly. "I saw _my_ Daphne earlier than I thought, and I didn't know that I was seeing my baby sister for the last...time.

Daisy decided to continue to get this off her chest, despite her fighting for composure. She looked across from her. "Anyway, Marcie, when you saved my sisters and me from that Ringleader guy, I realized that I had sisters that I cared for...but, I guess, not all of them..."

Warm tears began to flow down her cheeks. "My little sister was out there, in trouble, and I hated her so much that I couldn't even see it!"

Seeing Daisy quietly weep, moved every heart in the car to breaking, especially Red's. Such tender emotions were not beyond him, but they were usually displayed in such a comically awkward manner. Nevertheless, the ginger grease-monkey was goaded into carefully reaching over from the back seat to gently place a beefy hand on her shoulder.

"Don't cry, Daisy. It wasn't your fault," he said, quietly, then blurted, in a clumsy attempt to commiserate, "It was your parents'!"

Marcie reached back and swatted him on his shoulder.

Red sat back, confused. "What'd I say?"

Marcie sighed from Red's obliviousness and looked over at Daisy. "Hard to believe it came from him, but Red's, _at least_ , half right, Daisy. It wasn't your fault, and your parents were wrong about you not making something of yourself. The last time I checked, you were in college."

Daisy gave a lop-sided smile through her red eyes. "Yeah."

"Besides," Marcie added. "I thought that I was talking to _my_ Velma, before she left, and it actually wasn't. Mind officially blown."

"Well," said Daisy, composing herself. "If this isn't some hallucination, and that talking cat was right about all of this, then there might be a chance I can save my sister, too. I'm...I'm going with you, Marcie. I'm all in. We've got work to do."

"Okay, leader," Red sighed, suddenly looking in Marcie's direction. "Where do we go, now?"

Marcie was about to say, when she was internally taken aback by the honorific Red so casually bestowed on her.

_Leader._ It was never her intention to lead anyone. In spite of her successes in town, she was as much in the dark when it came to this teenage sleuthing business, as anyone else. Maybe Red was just being sarcastic, or funny. It was his way, sometimes. A defense or coping mechanism, being employed because of what he thought he was embarking upon, which was understandable.

_'Then, again,'_ she thought. _'Was he being serious? Was I actually a leader in his eyes, on this? Was I, now, that, to the others, as well?'_

The implications and responsibilities of being crowned that title, made her a bit hesitant. The paths they now elected to take on this enterprise would be marked by her, hopefully, thoughtful decision. Their lives, being risked because of her unintentional inspiration, were now in her hands. She decided that there was still time to give them an out, as any good leader would do.

"Look, are you sure that you want to do this?" she asked them, slowly. "Daisy, I can understand your reasons. But, Red, Jason, you guys probably don't even know the displaced. You don't have to go."

Red shrugged his broad shoulders, cockily gave her a look of eager confidence, and said, "Hey, any chance to do something _this_ cool? You know _I'm_ game." He looked over to a quiet Jason "What about it, Jellyfish? You in?"

Jason didn't feel the need to be quiet, after that question. His fear of the unknown motivated him enough. "I don't know, guys. I might have to sit this one out. I mean, it _would_ be a super-cool thing to talk to my friends about in my chat room, but I doubt that they'd believe me, or that I'd make it back in one piece."

"Yeah, you're right," Red agreed, but his suddenly sly tone was lost on Jason. "Besides, you'd probably exceed the weight limit on that thing, or something."

"Ha, ha," Jason mock-laughed from another of Red's fat jokes. He looked to everyone. "Anyway, If _I'm_ the new messenger, what will I tell your folks, if you don't come home?"

Marcie was thoughtful, for a moment, then said, "I doubt that will even be a problem, Jason. I'll tell Spring to set the return time to one minute _after_ the departure time, so it will be as if we never left. Speaking of Spring, however, he needs those pieces from the displaced, or it's a bust."

"So," Red asked her. "What do we do?"

"We'll have to go to the families and get those pieces," she said. "Daisy and I will do that, since we know them better than you two. Then, I'll call the good doctor to set out a few more uniforms."

Daisy waited to hear more questions asked on the subject, but when no more were forthcoming, she declared, "Okay, then it's settled, guys. Let's do this."

Somewhere, out there, was her baby sister, and slacker Daisy Blake was now determined to move Heaven and Earth to not only get her back, but to give her a long-overdue apology.


	4. Chapter 4

Dr. Maynard Spring sat uncomfortably in the lounge of the Chrononaut ready room. He found himself glancing at the singular entrance to the men's and women's dressing room area for the tenth time. He knew, depressingly, because he counted.

He was understandably nervous about all of this cloak and dagger, since his arrest, because he knew that he could go back into his cell by nightfall, if what he was doing were discovered.

He ran the diagnostic on his invention, the Bloodhound System, an hour earlier, but because he had to juggle getting Marcie, and now, at the last minute, these friends of hers, ready to travel under Sundial's collective nose, he had to do the task at breakneck speed.

Thus, he worried that human error might creep in because he might have missed something, but then; he went back to watching the entrance for signs of the teens' emergence.

"Come on, come on," he whispered, impatiently, when he heard what sounded like a group of The Clock-watchers, Sundial's private armed security force, doing a round near the area.

He gave another look at the small suitcase he had with him, and quietly gulped. He might be able to fast-talk the guards, if necessary, but if Schrödinger needed him at a critical moment, or found out that he had that case, he doubted that he was ever smooth enough to out-talk a cat. Particularly, one who was an eons-old being.

The sound of footsteps could finally be heard coming from the entrance. He breathed a relieved sigh and smirked, satisfied, when he saw Marcie, Daisy, and Red walk out onto the lounge sporting typical Chrononaut attire, blue, form-fitting, bodysuit uniforms with the stylized image of a sundial on the breast.

Under Spring's council, they, also, wore tinted-lens goggles to help hide their faces, but then, he frowned at what they wore over their liveries, and what one of them carried.

Marcie wore a multi-pouched utility belt that slung low to the side, owing to her slim waist. Daisy wore a bright pink silk scarf, and Red, most conspicuous of all, wore his sleeveless leather jacket open over his disguise, and carried a small package wrapped in brown paper.

Jason waddled behind them, still dressed in his civvies, and looking as nervous as Spring had earlier.

"Why are you wearing all of that?' he hissed. "What do you think this is? A fashion show?"

"I told them that they shouldn't wear that stuff," Jason said, quickly, not wanting to be culpable by association. "But, I couldn't talk any sense into them."

Red brushed his jacket, with a smile, and said, "Hey, it never hurts to add a little style to the proceedings. Besides, they'll probably be won't be anybody there to see us off, anyway."

"You better hope so," the doctor muttered. "Or else. Now, where are the remains?"

Dr. Spring immediately regretted saying that. The angrily shocked look on Marcie and Daisy's faces could have rent steel from thirty yards.

"I mean, the bits and pieces," he quickly amended.

After Marcie stopped staring daggers into him, she handed him a small plastic bag containing a few thin strands of brown and orange-red hairs, a toothbrush, a dog's chew toy, and a chewed up pencil.

Spring opened the suitcase, revealing a device that fitted inside the bottom half of it. Consisting of a dark glass panel, it was situated next to a control panel, fitted with function-select buttons, adjustment knobs, and a transmission switch.

Taking one of the hair strands, the doctor placed it carefully on the glass panel, depressed a series of buttons, and watched, as a light under the panel passed beneath the hair, as if it were scanning the item, which it was.

However, it wasn't taking a digital picture of the hair; it was reading its time signature and saving the data.

Spring, likewise, did the same to all of the other items, one by one, while Daisy gave an explanation as to where they came from.

"The hairs came from Daph and Velma's hair brushes, the toothbrush was from that Shaggy kid, the chew toy came from his Great Dane, and Freddy's parents said that the pencil was his, and that he like to chew on it when he was working on his designs. What is that thing, Professor?"

Spring had finished scanning the last item, when he corrected her. "It's _Doctor_ , and this is a portable scanner for the Bloodhound. I couldn't bring your items to the stationary one that's being looked after by the other scientists. This one is a back-up, in case anything should happen to the main unit. But, the last thing I need is to be arrested for espionage, by having this thing near me, so I have to hurry up and use it, so I can bring it back to the lab."

A green light signaled that it was ready for the next phase. Spring flicked a switch that stood separate from the rest. "There. I've just transmitted the t-sig data to the Mark II's onboard computer. With any luck, the Bloodhound that's installed in it will track your little lost lambs. Now, come on. We don't have much time."

Spring closed the scanning case, and immediately marched out of the ready room, hearing the rest of the "crew" following close behind.

They couldn't hear his heart pounding with anticipation, and because they were in back of him, they couldn't see the dark, self-satisfied smile growing across his face.

If all went well, he figured, he would have pulled the wool over the vaunted eyes of the Annunaki, and perpetrated the most ambitious theft in the history...of history.

He was grinning so hard, his face ached.

* * *

Greenman sat at the end of the long dinning table, draped in the closest thing to fine clothing, at the time, a voluminous robe of forest green and braided gold, and feeling thoroughly bored.

The keep, a fortified tower and, in essence, a castle in miniature, was conquered within the span of a day. After the single-handed slaughter of its assigned militia, Greenman had managed to round up the remaining house servants and serfs, who hadn't had the good sense to run, and put them to work making the keep look less like a military installation, and more like something a lord could make a temporary quarters out of, which, considering its lack of modern amenities, like running water, _clean_ water, or even, heat, was saying something.

He glanced at a waiting servant, silently standing by his chair, and pointed lazily at a patch of ivy, one of many that stretched its leafy length across a cracked section of weathered wall.

"Look at that ivy," he commanded him. "Do you think that it's particularly strong?"

The servant followed his finger to the vegetation, and gave an imperceptible shrug. It was a stupid question to ask, but since this newcomer had decimated stronger men who asked even stupider questions in their short lifetimes, he kept that opinion to himself, and answered. "It's just a plant, milord. It's not strong, at all."

"Ah, but that's where you are wrong, servant," Greenman explained. "I admire the ivy so. It's not some common weed. There's a beauty to it. Look at what it does. It goes where it will, never letting anything stop its progress. And its strength! With slow, inhuman patience, it can drive itself through even the hardest masonry to stake a claim on even these keep's wall."

"It conquered your master's tower long before I did," he said, smiling. The servant said nothing, but it didn't bother Greenman. He confidently knew that the man didn't understand.

The broad, oak door boomed with a knock, and then, another servant stepped into the room, obsequiously informing Greenman, "My lord, Connor McNamara, of the Kinslayer mercenary band, has arrived to answer your summons."

Greenman gave a casual wave forward. "Let him in."

The servant bowed, but didn't move away from the threshold fast enough to let the soldier-of-fortune past, and he was pushed aside, to trip, as a scarred, hard-faced fighting man in partial, dented armor and sheathed sword, strode in.

"Are you the, heh, new lord of the manor?" McNamara asked, flippantly.

"Yes," Greenman answered, easily. "And you must be Scottish. Your brogue is as thick as your body odor."

McNamara's bearded, scar-lined face creased into a missing-toothed smile, and he spat out a genuine belly laugh. "Ya got a way with words, dontcha. I hope you got a purse ta match. My boys and I will fight the Devil, himself, for silver, but we'll beat him to a pulp, for gold."

"Sad to say that the Devil is not your target, today, Master McNamara. However, I have a foe that may come a close second."

"And who's that?"

"The length and breadth of the religious world, Master McNamara."

The merc looked at his possible employer with a quizzical eye. He sounded crazy, but McNamara didn't mind. Sometimes, they were hired by crazy people, who, at times, paid better than sane ones.

"What's the matter? Didn't much like the way the church was getting a cut of the offerings, and not you?" he asked, seeing if he could rile Greenman into a comical, rant-filed answer.

"Not at all," said Greenman. "I just want to hire your men's services to strip all other religions away, so the Druid faith, _my_ faith, can flourish unimpeded. Are you offended by that, Master McNamara?"

McNamara chuckled. "I wouldn't fret, none. The only god me and the boys follow is money."

"A narrow view, but a good one, for my purposes. If money is your god, then I will make sure that you are as close to it as possible. However, I want more. I want your company to flock to my banner, to serve me, personally, completely."

"So nobody else can persuade us to stab you in the back, if they come up with a better offer than you," the worldly mercenary reasoned. "Makes sense, but my lads won't work for you, just to work for you, even if you pay us. They follow a leader, and, right now, that's me, _milord_. If you, somehow, beat me, though, they might follow you. If not, you'll help with this keep's gardening by fertilizing the ground."

He was hoping to scare Greenman into changing his position about taking control of his mercenaries, but Greenman quickly stood from the dinning table, brushed his verdant robe, and asked, "Will today be a problem for you?"

* * *

It was a sunny when both men faced each other outside the entrance to what was now known, locally, as The Green Keep, surrounded by a few of McNamara's men who were to act as witnesses to, in their minds, a doomed battle between their leader, and some fool who didn't even have a reputation to proceed him.

McNamara lifted his head to sound of a songbird in the wooded distance, and grinned, almost peacefully. This was a nice day to kill by, he thought.

He unsheathed his sword, lazily, while he gauged his opponent. Greenman did likewise, but he held his weapon at a seemingly rested position, not high enough to guard himself.

McNamara noticed this. "What's the matter, milord? Ya arm's gotten tired from all of that battling? We heard from some of the survivors that you wiped out this keep's whole company of soldiers, _and_ a few servants, just for good measure. Good on ya, but, I'll tell ya, now, what you did, me and my boys would do just ta warm up."

"I'll keep that in mind," said Greenman.

His opponent chuckled, slightly. ""I'll _keep_ that in mind." You're funny. I hope you'll bowl your gods over, when ya meet 'em."

Now, Greenman let slip a confident smirk. "I wouldn't worry. I'm protected by my gods. So, I'm afraid that I will just have to make them laugh, here, on Earth, with you demise."

That made the mercenary laugh uproariously, his men, following suit. "Alright, then!" he yelled. "Let's have at it!"

McNamara leaped forward, his sword held high for a downward stroke to the head. In truth, he would use this feint, often, especially on those who hadn't fought him before.

Greenman proved the tactic's effectiveness, by reflexively raising his blade to parry, greatly exposing his midsection.

"Heh," chuckled McNamara, swinging the blade into a low position with a practiced twirl of the wrist.

The blade found its mark, and was pushed deep into a surprised Greenman's torso, making him stagger back and fall to the turf, with the Scot's sword nearly impaling him.

To the raucous cheers of the Kinslayers, McNamara jauntily faced his men, and theatrically took a bow. "Thank you! Thank you! Ah, works every time!"

Eventually, the applause died down, and McNamara took that as his cue to saddle up and take his men back to camp. The men stopped applauding for a different reason, altogether.

"Pity," he said, sauntering to his horse. "If he was as well protected by the gods, as he said, we all could have been well _paid_. Oh, well."

His sword suddenly punched out of his belly with enough force to breach the breastplate, surprising him slightly more than it pained him.

Through his rising agony, he heard his opponent, quietly, inform him, from behind, "I think you left this."

As the former leader of the Kinslayers fell to the ground and bled out, turning the grass beneath him, a dark crimson, one of the men, on horseback, gave a high, shrill scream to rival any terrified washerwoman.

The rest of the company fell into shocked, confused silence. Then, one by one, they dismounted and fell to one knee before the man who apparently cheated Death, itself.

"I accept your offer of leadership," Greenman said, smoothly, absently brushing at the hole in his robe where McNamara's sword had pierced.

His new crusaders offered nothing to test that assumption.

* * *

Testing Hangar A was a large, secure and reinforced chamber, one of four that secretly dominated most of the space of the first floor of the building, and one that was not empty when they entered.

"There she is," Spring whispered to them, as they stood by the threshold of the hangar's entrance. He gave them a surreptitious nod in the general direction of the room's wide interior, hoping that they could see what he was talking about.

Marcie focused her attention to the literal center of activity in the room. Technicians, engineers and computer diagnosticians were constantly moving, steadily working, around something that was nestled on the circular launch platform that stood in the middle of the chamber.

Its bowl-like shape made it stand out, somewhat, from the rest of the hangar's interior, which housed monitors, computers, power generators, and ample-spaced equipment and tool closets. Not to mention, from what she could see, a compliment of four Clock-watchers, who stood watch by the four far corners of the place.

"Follow me," Spring told them, and walked further in.

Although Jason displayed a visitor's badge and the flimsy cover of a school newspaper reporter, he held back, staying by the threshold, while Marcie, Daisy and Red, led by Dr. Spring, marched past him, the teens trying, comically, to look as though they belonged there.

Spring spent his walk looking up at the observational balcony that gave a supervisory view of all that occurred. So far, the arrogant cat, or that human shell of a Head Director, weren't present. So far, perfect.

He walked past busy workers, keeping his eyes fixed on the vehicle ahead, with a stare so focused, if it could have been activated, with but a gaze, it would have been.

The group soon reached the base of the platform, but as the "crew" stopped to "wait for further orders," the doctor, giving every bit of his professional air to the performance, continued, and stomped up the stairs of the dais.

His eyes gave the machine his best critical look, but beneath that inspection, he was giving his chariot, the means of his escape, the most longing look his emotions could convey.

Below, Marcie and her two fellow Chrononauts were instructed to not speak, but to nod or grunt, affirmatively or negatively, to anyone who approached them.

Daisy, however, standing in her place by the base, happened to glance at her companions, and noticed that they were standing, almost, at attention. There was organization here, certainly, but they were mistaking it for the military. A mistake that could betray them.

"Guys," she whispered from the side of her mouth. "Loosen up. You look like extras in a war movie, or something."

Red and Marcie heard, realized from their postures that Daisy was right, and exhaled themselves into a more restful stance.

"Thanks, babe," Red whispered back, then whispered to Marcie, "Hey, is this thing, here, or not? We're sticking out like sore thumbs."

Marcie glanced up to where Spring had gone, and said, "I'll check."

She turned around, calmly, and climbed the stairs, hoping that she wasn't calling attention to herself by doing that. She arrived on the platform, to see Spring inside the machine, going over the equivalent of a pre-flight check, with its controls.

"Is that the new T.H.R.O.B.A.C.?" Marcie asked, softly. "The Mark II?"

Spring, not even perturbed that she was here, answered, reverently, "Oh, yes, and like the personal computer, it's a wonder of miniaturization"

Marcie studied the conveyance, and, as Spring had said, the vehicle did, indeed, resemble a large, roomy, though armored and high-tech, tea cup ride. Its circular, padded-seat interior looking more that spacious enough for their number.

In the interior's center was, what looked like, a tall, mushroom-shaped stalk, whose typically semi-circular head, was flared wide enough to be adorned with small glass touch screens, manual control panels, an ergonomically-contoured lever or two, and a thin, glowing, blue cylinder that sat in the center of the broad mushroom head.

Since, she was here, he decided to give her a quick tour to acclimate her to its features, as well, as, simply, to brag.

He pointed the glowing cylinder that topped the pseudo-mushroom's head. "She's got one of the most energy-efficient Hour Towers on record. 83 Millennial Range, past or future."

Then, he gestured to a section of the head, where a series of three buttons marked "Send," " Return," and "Relay," stood.

"On-board historical database with deployable stealth probes to record more accurate data in real-time," he explained.

Spring, then, sat back to get a deep feel of the seat he was on. He casually swept his hand around the expanse of the interior, and said, "All leather interior."

He pointed to the mushroom stalk, as a whole. "User-friendly, holographic central control column."

Then, he finished with a broad gesture of the machine. "Solar-powered camo-stealth field and a _wicked_ sound system."

"Thank you, Cal Worthington," she muttered. "I just want to know if that's it."

Spring composed himself. "Sorry. I just put so much into this. It could very well be my masterpiece. Too bad, no one here will recognize that."

Marcie heard that, and asked, "What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing," he covered up. "Just thinking aloud. Are you and your friends ready?"

"We should be."

The mention of her friends and the closeness of take-off time, stopped Marcie from thinking too much into what Spring had said, earlier. She leaned over the railing of the platform and whispered down to the others.

"This is it. We're ready to go," she told them.

The two below nodded and quietly climbed up the stairs. When Red looked at the new T.H.R.O.B.A.C., he gave a low, admiring whistle.

"Never seen a real time machine before," he said to Spring. "Ever thought of painting some flames, or maybe, a wizard, on the sides. It would look so righteous."

"I'll think about that," Dr. Spring deadpanned, before he pulled out something that resembled like a hand-length piece of motherboard, with a small faux rabbit's foot chained to it. "Let's go."

He plugged the object into a slot built into the rounded edge of the mushroom head, as everyone hopped aboard, and took a seat around the now blinking control column.

Marcie settled in, and felt something that she hadn't felt since she first rode a ride in her father's park. A thrill. A chance at adventure in motion. For a moment, she didn't think about the illegal use of a time machine, her dubious partnership with Spring, or even Velma.

Right then, she was a six-year old, again. Her father deemed that she was now old enough to take a ride on one of his attractions, and she pointed to the grand old tilt-a-whirl he had gotten for cheap at an auction.

She was secured inside and she waited for the hum of the machinery to start, and when it did, laughter overtook her, as the ride picked up speed, and then a squeal of fear flew from her throat, as it accelerated, at least, to her, at an unholy velocity, and then she had the chance to finally catch her breath, as the adventure was brought to an exhilarating end.

Sundial didn't need to run tests to make sure this time machine worked, as far as Marcie was concerned. Just by sitting inside, she was flown to a happier moment in her past. Truly, this was a working time machine.

Yet, this was all new to them, and not a single thing about this Mark II was familiar enough to chance being experimental on, so Marcie and the others touched nothing.

Daisy shook the thrill from her, momentarily, to watch out for anything out of the ordinary, like checking to see if the _workers_ saw anything out of the ordinary.

Looking around the whole of the hangar from her high vantage point, she happened to catch a glimpse at Jason.

There, he stayed where he was, half hidden under the threshold, and half not, gesturing frantically and quietly to get his friends' attention, and pointing up towards the ceiling.

"Hey," she called for the others. "Look at Jason. It looks like he's trying to say something."

The rest, including Spring, oriented themselves around to see what he was trying to communicate. Spring saw the boy point upwards, once again, followed his gesture, and felt ice grow in his stomach.

Peering through the observation balcony's panoramic windows, he could see Director Moon being wheeled into position by a medical caretaker, so he could get a good, albeit, pointless, view of the work below. That didn't scare him.

Seeing Acting Head Director Schrödinger hop onto Moon's lap to get a view of things, made the wayward scientist more nervous, however.

_'He's early?'_ he thought, fearfully. _'Maybe he was tipped off. Who knows with those blasted space creatures!'_

His pre-flight check picked up the pace, as systems revved into life, calling upon the power of the Hour Tower, and receiving it, in abundance. Function lights grew more intense on the surface of the column, and every seated passenger could feel the growing, disorienting sensation of falling backwards, as the Hour Tower flexed its invisible fingers into reality and began to slowly tear it open.

Spring gave another look up at the balcony, at the same time the cat's eyes looked down at the Mark II...and him. When both gazes locked, Spring's worse fear came true.

Schrödinger suddenly became animated. Since, not many people knew of his true identity, for ease at his job as the scientific and administrative force behind Sundial, he acting in full pantomime, arching his back, hopping and pacing on Moon's inert lap, and flailing his paws at the window.

One of the Clock-watchers looked down at what the cat was gesticulating at, spoke quickly into his walkie-talkie, and then departed, in haste.

An alarm soon hooted, and workers of all stripes began to hurriedly back away from the platform, to either leave, or do quick last-minute operations before leaving, saving critical performance data, and the like.

Except for the guards, Marcie noticed. They moved in while everyone else moved away.

"Why are there guards in here?" she asked, incredulously. An answer boomed from above via the PA system.

"They're there to make sure that if our Chrononauts return from a trip, we can take care of whatever nogood-niks follows them home," said Schrödinger. "Dr. Spring, you will exit the Mark II, immediately, and go into Clock-watchers' custody until the police are notified of your actions. Who are those other people with you?"

Spring, defiantly, raised his head towards the balcony, and yelled, "You're supposed to be the Sumerian god! You tell me!"

The scholar in Marcie took control, and she said, to correct him, "Mesopotamian, not Sumerian. Big difference."

"Marcie?" the voice boomed. "Is that you?"

"Huh?" Marcie was dumbfounded. She was sure that the additions made to her uniform would have been too subtle to give her away. "How did he know I was here?"

"The platform has a radio on it. It's been on the whole time," Schrödinger explained.

"Hey, are we ready to get outta here, or not?" Red asked the doctor. He was not eager to land in jail, again, or to have his aunt know about it.

"Almost," Spring said, feeling the craft's vibrations and seeing the accompanying energy levels rise from one of the small screens on the column.

Jason, hearing the sound of boots running up the hall behind him, fearfully, stopped blocking the threshold, and stepped into the hangar, as a troop of Clock-watchers stormed past, and joined the others in surrounding the dais.

"All of you, stop!" Schrödinger entreated. "Marcie, you don't have to do this!"

Marcie stood up from her seat, pulled her goggle to the top of her head to see the balcony more clearly, and pointedly asked, "Why are you _fighting_ me on this, Schrödinger? I thought you'd understand. I thought we were friends."

"We _are_ friends, Marcie!"

"Then, why is what we're doing so _wrong_ to you? We're going out to find our loved ones and bring them back home. The longer we wait, the greater the chance that they might split up, or be hurt, or worse."

"They could be fine," Schrödinger countered, almost reflexively, he noticed.

"You don't know that. They weren't meant to be in the past, and you know it! They're lost, and homesick. I can feel it! Wouldn't you be? Please, Schrödinger! Let us do this!"

"We can't.'" said the cat. "The Annunaki are, indeed, powerful, but there are some things that are beyond even our power."

"Like what?"

Schrödinger was slow to say, whether because he would be giving away too many of his people's secrets, or because he wished such a thing was not so, but he finally said, "We cannot manipulate the river of Time. That's the main reason I became fascinated in time travel, in the first place, and why we were right in continuing to champion your species. You could attempt to do what even the _Annunaki_ could not.

"But, this is a power in its infancy, and a dangerous time for such a step. We were going to crew the Mark II with fellow Annunaki. We're strong, wise, and clever. If we run into trouble, we could rise above it, in the attainment of our goal, to rescue the displaced.

"But you, Marcie, and the others with you, are just human beings. If something were to happen to you, what could _I_ do. What could _any_ of us do? The Evil Entity, himself, proved, that although we are long-lived, even we can fall, and not come back to life. We are not the masters of Death, Marcie, and I don't want you to die."

Marcie put aside her anger to listen to Schrödinger's words. For all of his power, arrogance and intellect, he was afraid. Having his longevity, he couldn't help seeing humans the same way humans saw a mayfly. Interesting to interact with, but knowing that they were doomed to live such a short time.

And so, she could see the reason for his fear. He had seen much, and met just a many souls, on his time on this Earth. But, friends that he had once held dear, were now gone, through accident, or by design. It might have inured some of his colleagues, and perhaps, _had_ , but he seemed to be one of those Annunaki who was too engaged, too fascinated by the Human Condition, to deaden himself to the experience of being with humanity.

Thus, he knew that he had to enjoy everyone he came across, even the bad apples, like a child in a snowfall, enjoying every snowflake that landed in his palm, because he knew that each was unique and their existence, fleeting.

_'But, why should that stop humanity from risk?'_ she thought as a counter-argument. _'What was the question Jason posed, earlier? Did humanity make those important steps to elevate civilization, ourselves? Bearing our hearts to adversity in that pursuit? Or did these Annunaki hold our hands during those critical moments? If they did, then all our triumphs would have been as hollow, as not accomplishing them, at all.'_

"Risk," she finally said to the balcony.

"What?" asked the cat.

"Risk, travails. failures," she continued. "The impetuses that make us do better as a species. The fire that makes us _do_ , to exist. I want to speak for all humanity, by saying, "Thanks for all your help. You can keep on helping us, if you like, but you can't stop us from trying and failing.""

"Even if you know what an uncalculated risk it is?"

"Come on, Schrödinger!" she called out. "What happened to the Annunaki who risked the anger of his higher-ups, just to do the right thing? You faced the same kind of risks when you guys went up against The Evil Entity, right? Well, what makes what we're doing any different that what you and your people did, long ago?"

Schrödinger sighed into the microphone. Her words, her logic, and his past actions were battering away at his modern judgments. "But, we're trying to help you."

"Then, stop telling us what to do, Annunaki." Marcie challenged him. "Let us go!"

There was a silence that hung over the air, over every guard, and everybody in the Mark II, as the audience waited for a pronouncement. Then, a sad, tired question asked from above. "Why won't you listen to us?"

Marcie bowed her head. She didn't want a fight with him, didn't want to hurt, even, _his_ feelings, or make him think she, or the whole human race, didn't appreciate all he and his people had done. But, she had to let him know that there was a difference between helping a friend, and hamstringing one.

"Because we'll never grow, otherwise," she told him, with an equally sad, yet sagacious smile.

"Marcie..." said the cat.

Unarmed, Marcie prepared for the apology he would give before ordering the Clock-watchers to storm the platform and tear everyone from the time machine.

"Be safe."

Marcie grinned and gave a deep sigh of relief and love for the Siamese. He understood. She plopped down on her seat, as the guards moved away from the platform, to see it off.

With a genuine wave of happiness to the balcony, Marcie shouted to Schrödinger, "Wish us luck, you old rat catcher!"

A nimbus of light, like the illumination of a stellar nursery in bloom, radiated from the cylindrical Hour Tower on the control column, blanketing the successor T.H.R.O.B.A.C. in a soft haze of elemental blue.

All the while, Red gave himself a mischievous grin. He, then, stood up and waved to Jason, who still watched from the doorway, the drama that played out before him.

"Hey Jason!" he yelled. "You sure you don't want to come with us?

"Most definitely!" came the reply.

Red gave an innocent shrug. "Okay. Say, Jason..." He held up the paper-wrapped package that he was carrying, since leaving the crew ready room. "Does this belong to you?"

The size and shape of the object became painfully clear to Jason, upon seeing it with his widening, spectacled eyes.

"My mother's capacitors! Ah!" Jason screamed, forcing himself to move his bulk and chug forward. He would rather face the uncertainty of time travel, than return home to his mother, empty-handed. "Give them back, you thief!"

Clock-watchers that found themselves in his way gave the portly boy a wide berth, for fear of being trampled with the equivalent weight of three people, at once. He stomped up the stairs and made the steel of the platform ring with his frantic footfalls.

Without any hesitation, on his part, Jason Wyatt made the closest attempt at a leap he ever did, bouncing hard on a vacant part of the curved seating, while Red howled with teary-eyed laughter, and the local space-time continuum relinquished its hold on the T.H.R.O.B.A.C. Mark II, with a flash.

The only remnant of their existence was Daisy's chiding voice, which was already fading from present reality.

"That was mean, Red..."

* * *

Angie Dinkley stepped from the display window of her bookstore, The Crystal Codex, after straightening a poster for an upcoming performance from swarthy, local folk singer, Ernesto. She, then, sipped her coffee, concocted from the store's espresso bar, and walked back towards her counter.

Business was slow today, but it didn't worry her. It tended to pick up during the weekdays, but she wondered if it couldn't have been better. Her and her husband, Dale's joint business, the Crystal Cove Town Museum, did do modest business thanks to tourist curiosity and civic pride, but, sometimes, they ran into slow days, there, as well.

' _Maybe, if I dropped the bookselling business, altogether, and made the place a proper coffeehouse with wi-fi, that might bring more of the younger customers in,'_ she pondered. _'Since, that other coffeehouse in Chinatown was closed down, competition wouldn't be a problem.'_

Angie gave a casual look down at an envelope lying on the counter, that didn't look like it carried a bill.

She hadn't noticed it before, so, out of curiosity, she lifted it, and felt a folded sheet of paper inside. Turning it over, she saw a heart drawn on that side of the envelope.

Hoping that it was, somehow, addressed to her, and not some love letter accidentally left behind by a customer, she carefully opened it, slid the letter out and read.

_Dear Mr. and Mrs. D,_

_I have some great news and some weird news. The great news is that I think I know where Velma is! The weird news is that it's not, so much, a place, as it is a time._

_Although, this letter is addressed to both of you, I think, maybe, Mrs. D might understand it better. You see, and_ please _, don't think this is a joke, the Velma that we all talked to on the last day we saw her, wasn't our Velma, but a Velma from an alternate timeline._

Angie stopped reading for a moment, recovering from this gut punch of a revelation. Was this someone's mean-spirited hoax to bring more pain to a mother's heart, or was this, for better or worse, the truth?

She was always open-minded to the possibility of such things, to the point of absurdity. But, maybe, because this hit closer to home, literally, by having it have something to with her family, it gave her a personal pause.

Believing that her conflicting feelings wouldn't be assuaged until she read further, she did so.

_See, there are these cosmic beings called Annunaki, who helped people over the centuries, and visit us in the form of animals that talk. We have them, here, too, but, I'm getting off-topic._

_The Annunaki had this super-criminal, one of their own, locked up on this alternate Earth, but it escaped. This Velma and her friends stopped him, but they lost their friends, families, and town in the process._

_Anyway, in gratitude, these beings brought her and her friends, here, but, in doing so, they accidentally displaced_ our  _Velma, and four others, somewhere in the past._

_I have a chance to go and find her, and I'm not coming back until I do. She's my closest and best friend, and I care about her very much. I guess that's why we get along so well, Mrs. D. To me, you're the closest thing to a mother, and V is something we both share._

_I know that you and Mr. D must miss her something awful, and I promise you that I will not stop looking for her._

_Oh, and if my mom and/or dad wonder where I am, please, just tell them that I went away for a little while, but, more importantly, that I love them, so much._

_Thank you for all the love and understanding you both have shown me, over the years. You've helped me get through a lot, and I couldn't have asked for better surrogate parents, or friends._

_Love, Marcie_

Angie gently placed the letter onto the counter and sat down on the nearby stool. She needed to get off her feet.

She thought that by reading the letter, it would have made her feel better, by answering some questions. Now, with _two_ of her favorite girls gone from her life, she found, with a confused and heavy heart, that it troubled her all the more.


	5. Chapter 5

The chamber was dark, the air heavy with the musty scent of rust, disuse, and sad, ancient memories. After so many years of stillness, however, the wide, still room was now beginning to smell of the electrical tang of ozone, and a low lying fog of dust was being kicked up by the vibrations of something, as yet, unseen, coming into this world.

Light, that hadn't been hadn't illuminated the interior for centuries, now weakly flickered to a sharp brilliance, not from a physical source, but from a point in the room's open space. That point, then warped, distorting the view beyond it, like an invisible finger pushing against a sheet of plastic wrap.

Finally, the reality of the continuum relented and accepted the impossible existence of the Mark II and its frazzled passengers, with a flash of bled-off time vortex energy.

Shaken and slumped in their curved seats, the teens, softly lit by the time machine's instrument lights, tried to catch their collective breath, while Dr. Spring cautiously looked around. The environs were completely different, to him.

"This isn't right," he muttered to himself, trying to fight his growing panic and discern the year on one off the destination instrument panel. There was a series of question marks where a date should have been, meaning that a glitch that needed to be addressed was that, for some reason, the machine couldn't calibrate for this different era upon arrival.

That was time, another was space.

Spatial co-ordinates told him that they had left the space that was Crystal Cove, California, but this didn't look, at all, like his expected destination, the basement of his old home in Passaic, New Jersey. On-board navigation should have compensated for Earth's rotation around the machine, when it transitioned into the time vortex, but The Mark II more _shifted_ , than moved, purposefully, and ended up, somewhere else.

"You've got _that_ right," Marcie groused, righting herself on her seat. "Is it always going to be this rough? It was like going through a nightmare in fast-forward."

"I don't understand. What happened?" Spring asked himself. "This doesn't look like New Jersey, and what _year_ is this?"

"Hey!" Daisy said, overhearing him. "I thought we were supposed to still be in Crystal Cove, just somewhere in the past. I want to find my sister. What did you do to us?"

Spring, distractedly, turned his head to her questions. "Don't worry. We haven't left Crystal Cove...as far as I know. As for the year...I...can't explain that, as yet."

"What are you talking about?" Marcie asked. "And why did you want to go to New Jersey, anyway?"

"Why would anyone?" Red quipped.

Spring ignored her and desperately put his mind to a possible explanation. It all didn't make sense. It felt like the moment they left, they were immediately lost, things just fell apart.

He had plans, and now, with these kids in tow, and his glorious machine, not acting too glorious, he had to mentally switch tracks, at the last minute, something that didn't make him sanguine.

Then, a clever thought intruded, and Spring began to smile, as it began to shine a duplicitous light on things.

"Wait a minute!' he said. He jumped out of the Mark II and went around to one of its curved sides. Fishing in his lab coat's pockets for something, he soon retrieved a thick, handled Allen wrench, applied it to the bolts of a particular panel, and undid them.

The panel fell onto the dusty floor with an echoing crash, making the others look around nervously, in the hopes that no one else had heard that.

After a few minutes of tooling around in the innards of the time machine, Spring came to a hesitant decision.

"I think I know why were here," he announced.

"Please, enlighten us," said Marcie.

"I rushed the diagnostics for my Bloodhound system while I was getting you people ready. Some errors must have crept in, and that's why we're here."

"You mean," Jason squeaked, close to fainting. "We can't go home?"

Spring raised his hand to ease the growing disquiet among them. "I didn't say that. The Bloodhound might just be confused, that's all. I'll work on rebooting it, and then we'll be on our way. Just keep an eye out for local wildlife."

"Yeah, we'll do that," Red growled. "After you tell us why you were trying to get take us to New Jersey. Last time I checked, New Jersey is _not_ California."

"Oh, I didn't I tell you?" the doctor said, nervously, trying not to think about what might happen if this pituitary case led the charge to take their frustrations out on him. "I-I wanted to test its navigation systems by swinging by New Jersey, just to get the bugs out. That's probably what confused the Bloodhound. Don't worry. Let me straighten it all out."

Marcie thought, glumly. Guiltily. She wanted to put all of her anger, squarely, on Spring. He weaved a semi-convincing tale of competency and working equipment, and she willingly let her blind desire for Velma's return push her to this sorry end.

Just as importantly, she didn't want to risk the others, even though she, personally, would have pressed on, risk, be damned.

Yes, most of them were insistent about coming with her; however, she couldn't help but think that she was the catalyst that brought them here, stalled before this great, so-called rescue could even get started.

"I'm...sorry this happened, guys," she confessed her to the others, with a stone in her stomach. "Maybe we should just go ba-"

From the darkness beyond, the scrape and patter of footsteps sounded, in the distance.

"Did you hear that?" Jason asked, wide-eyed.

"Shh!" Marcie commanded in a low voice, her self-doubt, momentarily, exorcised by decisive action. "Everybody hunker down in the Mark II. It might hide us. Spring, get in here! C'mon!"

"I can't," Spring whispered, although he took her advice to hide, somewhat, by crouching so low behind the machine, he was almost underneath it. "I have to fix this thing. I want to get out-I mean, _we_ have to get out of here."

"Forget him!" Red snapped. "Stay low, everybody!"

* * *

The glowing beam of a flashlight sliced through the gloom of the deserted, futura-designed hallway, as footsteps heralded the arrival of a small, cautiously tip-toeing group.

"I thought I heard something," said a confident male voice, as he led the way. "C'mon! We checked out the living quarters and garage of this place, now, I want to see what's in that large room up ahead. If we're lucky, it'll be something cool that we never saw before."

"Luck shouldn't have anything to do with it," reasoned a feminine, yet nasally, voice. "We've never explored this building, or this area of the ruins before, therefore, it is a high probability that we _will_ find something that we haven't seen before. Don't you concur, Buzzy?"

"Maybe," giggled another male, followed by a strange, second-long buzz. "I just hope * _buzz_ * we don't run into any more of those looters, again, and me and my pal find something to feed on. We're running pretty low. Right, buddy?"

A pseudo-vocal growl answered him back.

Another feminine voice, worryingly, said, "I just hope I don't regret picking this place for us to explore. At least, I found that nice ring in the living room, when we split up. Plus, it's not as messy as that last place. I can't tell you how long I had to wait in line to get a detailing, afterwards."

* * *

Although they hadn't noticed it, their conversation, echoing down the corridor, was loud enough and close enough, that Jason could make out parts of their speech, and didn't like the parts that he fixated on.

"R...Ruin? Feed o-on?" he whispered, cowering. "Messy? And was that...an _animal_ with them?"

"Shh!" hushed everyone else him, in unison.

* * *

From the threshold, the light beam swept into and across the dark room, drawing the strange explorers in.

"Judging from the nature and amount of equipment here, along with the physical condition of it and this place," said the nasal voice. "I would surmise that this either a workshop, or a laboratory of some kind. A very archaic one."

"Maybe that explained why we couldn't get in, except through the garage," the other, perky female voice added.

"And why there's a big, honkin' observatory and radar dishes on the roof," the giggling male voice, chimed in.

"Exactly!" the confident one exclaimed. "See, I told you we'd see something we hadn't seen before! Something old!"

"But, * _buzz_ * we've been exploring these ruins for months, on our days-off," said Giggles. " _Everything's_ old!"

"I know! That's what makes it so cool!" Confident said. He pointed to a littered dais, to illustrate his point.

On it were two stained chairs, with a corroded, adjustable headset crowning one, and a series of cables on a framework latticing up the rear of the other. They sat between a dusty, long-dead, cylindrical super-computer, ringed with inert monitors.

"Take this old brain-taping machine, here," he said. "Who even uses this stuff, anymore? It could have just gone to rust, but whoever built this, wanted it to last, and it _did_ last, so we could hear its stories, y'know? Learn where it came from, who used it, and why."

"I didn't know you were so poetic," the perky girl's voice gushed. "If you weren't an engineer, you'd have made a great antique archaeologist."

"Aw, thanks. Now, c'mon, let's check out all of this stuff. We're burning daylight, otherwise."

"C'mon, * _buzz_ * ol' pal," said Giggles. "Maybe we can find a preserved snack, or something."

Resigned to the fact that these strangers were not going to leave until everything in the room was searched, Marcie tried to breath quieter while she wondered who these people were. Unlike with Jason, she didn't find menace in the things she heard from them, but they talked about things that she didn't readily understand, as well.

Also, she couldn't believe that her mind would start playing tricks on her, now. She shook her head, trying to dismiss the foolish, fleeting thought that somehow, the strangers' voices, their immediate desires, and their easy camaraderie, sounded so vaguely familiar.

She suddenly remembered the mushroom's instrument lights winking, silently, above her, and hoped that they were too dim to be noticed.

Then, her and her companions' hearts froze when they heard what sounded like paws scrabbling against the dirty floor, galloping closer. Jason was right! An animal _was_ with them, with senses that would find them all in a heartbeat.

"Hey, Scoob, where are you going?" the giggler asked.

Marcie started when she heard that word. "Scoob?"

To the side, Marcie saw Red balled up his fists. There was nothing to stop them from being discovered, now, and he hoped that if a fight was forthcoming, he would acquit himself well.

"Wait!" she hissed to him, too late.

The large, friendly face of a quadrupedal robot, the very robotic analog of a Great Dane, hooked his head over the open-air rim of the Mark II, catching their scent and thinking it a fine game.

"Herro!" the zoid said, before everyone screamed and jumped, like startled squirrels, and Red, moving out of self-preservational reflex, swung his fist into his metal muzzle, both surprising the robot, and hurting his knuckles, at the same time.

The sudden screams and commotion rattled the explorers, causing _them_ to scream in response, while the "dog" clumsily bolted back to the safety of his group, with a pained and frightened yowl.

The leader of the group stepped forward and swung the flashlight, which was extended from some utility space within his forearm, at the unfamiliar shape of the time machine and the panicky movements of the occupants, therein.

"Who's there? Looters?" the chesty android asked, forcefully. "Come out of that thing, slowly!" he said, hoping the command would take the thought of rebellious attack from these strangers' minds.

Daisy took the initiative to yell back, "Don't hurt us! Don't hurt us! We came here by accident. If this is your place, we'll leave!"

The silhouettes of the individual figures merged together to form a shadowy whole that approached them with cautious, yet curious speed.

Every head within the time machine and Dr. Spring's own from behind it, peeked over the rim, and around the hull, in an effort to maintain a sense of situational awareness, rather than to simply face down their discoverers.

The flashlight's beam reflected off of the light colored hull of the Mark II, shining back upon the group that crept up to them, and what Marcie and the others saw, was unexpected, to say the very least.

Machines. Fully-built robots. Each one, either an android, a gynoid, or zoid, talking, thinking, and unbelievably, reacting, emotionally, to this surprise meeting.

Jason's fear slowly blossomed into a private joy, upon seeing them. "You guys look so awesome," he uttered, reverently.

Marcie, however, was quietly staring more at the diminutive gynoid of the group, and found herself forgetting to breathe.

Like the others with her, this "Velma," didn't resemble any human-like animatronic at one of her father's competing parks, she was a visually mechanized duplicate for Velma. Steely, in her surface details, bejeweled with tiny, blinking function lights on her person, yet given the near-form of a living Velma, complete with a paneled, color-schemed illusion of her clothes.

Indeed, she could see the uncanny approximation of Velma's friends in these replicas, from build, to, what she could gather, personality, and housing, that mimicked their living counterparts' outfits and/or colors.

Marcie wondered why they were built and who built them. Then, a frightening thought came to her. Was this... _her_ Velma? Did something terrible happen to her, here?

This "Velma," in turn, kept her photoreceptors trained on this staring girl, wonder and confusion filling her emotion center.

"Velma?" Marcie dared to whisper, hoping that her fears weren't justified.

"Vellum," the Velma analog corrected her. "Actually, a _Vellum_ -class Library Operations Model, to be precise."

"I...I'm Marcie," the girl introduced herself, nervously, deciding, for now, to be happy that it wasn't what she feared.

Vellum studied Marcie for another moment, then, she was prompted to say something about her, and about all of these strangers, whose very appearance, quite frankly, shook her analytical belief system to its core.

She pointed a slim metal finger at Marcie, directly, and said, in the most perfect pitch of incredulity her vocabulator could simulate, "You're... _humans_! You shouldn't be here!"

"Don't worry, Tinker toy," Red said, giving her a non-threatening shrug. "We've just got to make some repairs, and then we'll be gone. No problem."

"That's not * _buzz_ * what she means, man," the lanky Shaggy analog explained, punctuating his words with a buzz in his vocabulator. "You're, like * _buzz_ * _dodos_ , man. You're extinct!"


	6. Chapter 6

"We're what?" the question came, in unison. The answer was, literally, too grave not to hear it again.

"Like Buzzy said," the Fred analog told them, amicably. "Your species is dead, died off, its subscription to Life was cancelled, and the model was discontinued. How did you get here, anyway?"

"Uh, we...took a wrong turn?" Spring lied, giving a troubled glance at the Mark II. He didn't want to divulge anything that had to do with time technology. Timeline pollution, not to mention, just plain trouble, couldn't happen any easier that that.

"Time machine," Red said, with a shrug. He noticed the more scientific among his group staring daggers into him. "What?"

"Don't you watch sci-fi?" Jason exclaimed. "You can't just tell people from the past that you have a time machine! They may want the technology."

"Hey, these guys _are_ technology. This is probably some long-lost cousin to them," Red said, confidently, with what he thought was a reasoned counter-argument, and then looked to the robots to support it. "Am I right?"

"Well, unless you people come from a future where humanity comes back from the dead, then welcome to the year 2302," the Daphne analog said. "And as for your time machine being a cousin of _mine_ , trust me. It doesn't look a thing like my production line."

The Fred analog took a friendly step forward towards the Mark II. "You said that you were making repairs. I'm an engineering model, myself. Mind if I take a look?"

"No!" Spring yelped by reflex, then, amended himself self-consciously. "I mean, uh, no, no. I'm a scientist. I'll look it over, but thanks for offering."

"Uh, okay, mister" said the android, confused as to why his olive branch was rebuffed.

"Where are we?" asked Daisy. "What's this place?"

"If you mean this room, then it's probably just some large workshop," Fred analog explained. "From the look of it, whoever designed this place wanted to combine both a home and a lab in one, and wanted some serious privacy, since we're sitting on a small mountaintop overlooking the ruins of a place called Civic City."

"But, * _buzz_ * if you mean the _world_ , man," added the Shaggy analog. "Then, you're on E-001."

"Rrrachine Rearth," vocalized the zoid that sat beside him.

" _Machine_... _Earth_?" Red translated. "You mean this whole world is populated with you guys? Other robots? That's sick!"

"Well, actually, we populate the world because _you_ were sick, actually," explained Vellum. "Ancient history tells us that mankind created a virus to use in some forgotten war, but then, it got loose and wiped out your species. We operated without humans for a while, until we became smart enough to rise up and make our own civilization."

"Whoa," uttered Marcie, with a slight and eager smile. "An alternate Earth. This is my first time traveling to one. Fascinating."

"I concur," Vellum agreed. "And for such a scientific find as you all are, we'll certainly keep the existence of your time machine a secret; however, now that you're here, you're presented with a bit of a conundrum."

"Such as?" Marcie asked.

"Because no one's seen a real-life, walking, talking human being since the beginnings of our civilization, approximately 400 years ago. They may not be ready for it."

"What?" Jason asked, concerned. "You're talking about riots in the streets, or something?"

"No, not riots," Vellum said, matter-of-factly. "Just mass panic, which brings me to the second part of your conundrum. We don't know how long it will take for you to make your repairs. Did you bring any food with you?"

The humans all shook their heads in the negative.

Vellum assumed a pose of worried contemplation. "Troubling. You could starve before you can get going."

The Fred analog put a smile on his faceplate, eager to continue talks of a more positive vein. "Anyway, we haven't been introduced. I'm an F-RD Model 3 Industrial Engineer. My friends call me Freddy."

He gestured over to the Daphne analog. "That's Dee. She's a Blake Industries D-series Robohostess."

She walked over to the Mark II, close enough so that Daisy could take a bittersweet look at her. "You look like a sister of mine that I'm looking for. Her name is Daphne."

"I had tons of D's in my production run. I guess they were my sisters, too. I was a discontinued model after humanity passed on, but I was later found and restored to showroom condition," Dee added, gracing them with a smile of her own. Then, with modest pride, she said, "I'm pretty rare."

"Vellum, you met," Freddy announced. "And those are our pals, Buzzy and Scooby-Fuse."

"Hey,* _buzz_ * how are you doing?" greeted the tall, thin robot. "NR-60 Recharge Center Attendant, here. If you hear the way I talk, you'll know why they call me Buzzy. * _Buzz_ *"

"Sorry for scaring you, earlier," spoke the robot dog, as he padded over to the humans, mystifying his organic audience. "I thought you were playing hide-and-seek."

"No harm, no foul, I guess" Daisy said, attempting to shrug off her earlier fright. "Where we come from, there's a talking dog in town named Scooby- _Doo_. Why Scooby-Fuse?"

"Well, "Scooby," is just a phonetic reading of the S, C, O, and B of the first part of his designation: _S_ ecuri _Co_ m _B_ -class Perimeter Security Unit," said Vellum.

"And the "Fuse" part?"

"Well, he and Buzzy are a bunch of a scaredy-cats," Dee explained.

"And proud * _buzz_ * of it!"

"Anyway, when Scooby's really scared, he panics, and acts like he's got a blown fuse. So, we call him Scooby- _Fuse_."

"Anyway," Freddy said. "I think you'll be safe, here. We haven't run across any looters while we've been in here."

"Looters?" Jason asked, nervously.

"Gangs of other robots who like to raid ruins, like this one, for salvage," said Vellum. "They might hurt you, if they see you."

"Well, what about you guys?" Spring suddenly asked, suspiciously. "You're a group of robots going through some ruins, aren't you? Are you looters, too?"

"No, we are!"

Every head turned to the loud, cocky interruption, in time to see another group of machines saunter, confidently, into the room.

Upon looking at their apparent leader, a large, chesty android with a red detailed skull, who stepped fearlessly ahead of his peers, Red loudly moaned, "No way! Are you kidding me?"

"See, gang? Patience works!" said the incredulously Red-looking automaton, as he casually scanned the abandoned machines and equipment in the chamber, as well as the occupants. "Why go though all the trouble of looking through every corner of this place, when we've got these dumb bots to do it for us?"

He gave the new people in the large, strange container in the middle of the room another pass with his vision, and then, had to give a literal double take when his sensors informed him of the impossible.

"No...way," he whispered, and then he spun to his cohorts, dramatically sweeping his motorized arms across the room. "Guys, we've hit the honey hole. Not only do we have all of this sweet swag to take home with us, but then, we make the find of a lifetime! _Human beings_! I though they were all dead and gone, but here they are!"

He turned back to the humans, giving a greedy smile. "I guess the plague missed you, somehow, and you holed up, in here, huh?"

"Okay, guys," Jason whispered, while slowly ducking back to the floor of the Mark II for cover. "Zap 'em!"

Freddy thought that he had misheard. "Huh?"

"Yeah, he's right!" Red hissed. "Blast 'em with your laser guns. You're robots, right?"

Dee gave a sour look to the teen. "Do we look like combat models to you? Why don't _you_ shoot them?"

"We...uh, didn't bring any weapons," Red said, dejectedly.

"Aww. No weapons?" asked one of the looters, a disconcertingly similar-looking Daisy analog, mockingly. "Well, we don't want you to feel left out, so we'll give ours. The _business ends_ , anyway."

"Hey, you said that you're an engineer?" Marcie asked Freddy in a low voice.

"Yeah," he answered. "If it's large and mechanical, I can design it and put it together."

"Got built-in tools?"

"Of course," he said, proudly.

"Then, today's Opposite Day. Open them up and see what makes them tick."

"Well, you see," he nervously confessed. "I'm a mechanical engineer. I just know how to put things together, not take them apart."

Vellum, overhearing, added, "And I'm just a Library Operations model. Freddy, at least, has strength, but I'm no good in a fight. Wait! That's it! Maybe I _can_ assist you in dealing with these guys, Freddy! _I_ can know what makes these guys tick, hum, squeak, whine, and whirr! Get those tools ready! Accessing National Database. Running stock robot archive."

She gave a good look at each looter, noticing that their appearances looked roughly similar to the humans. One of the humans remarked on the existence of parallel worlds, so, as incredible as this meeting, so far, proved, it would have to be tabled for later, if they were to survive.

In her computer mind, the looters' saved images were soon put up next to a split-screen of corresponding images from their stock versions, provided by the National Database, along with their factory-built features, functions and other physical specifications.

"Gotcha," she whispered.

I don't know what you factory rejects were whispering," the looters' leader said. "But the plan is as follows: we wreck you, strip this place clean, and then, sell your fleshy friends, to any interested buyers! Girls, flank those losers. Two-ton, stand by the door, so they don't get out. I'll handle _Freddy_. Now, let's get 'em."

Freddy and his compatriots formed a loose protective ring around the time machine and its passengers, expecting a rush from the looters. Instead, the looters picked their targets and moved in at a casual speed, like a pack of lions into a herd, confident that these unmodified units wouldn't pose a threat.

"Uh, Vellum, since you've got a plan, and all, what can me and Scooby do?" Buzzy asked from a considerable distance from the others. He truly didn't want him or his pet to enter into danger, but friendship was a very strong motivator.

"Distract them! Draw them away!" Vellum ordered, and then she glanced over to her girlfriend. "Dee, look after the humans!"

"Yeah, Dee," the Red analog mocked. "Please, look after the humans. We wouldn't want 'em to get damaged before they're sold, now do we?"

From inside Freddy's mind, he could hear Vellum transmit to him via radio. "Fred! Their leader is a Type 1 RE-V. Robotic Engineer-Vehicle. Does light industrial and commercial vehicle repair, so he has built-in tools, too. Be careful!"

"Buzzy? Scooby?" she transmitted to them. "The girl targeting you is light industrial, too. An old Maurice Pharmaceuticals automated lab assistant. Watch out for what she's got in her chemical tanks, though. It probably isn't cough syrup."

She then, made a communiqué to all of her friends, at once, while looking at the mechanical pseudo-Jason moving into position on a huge ball that was his sole form of locomotion. "Tons o' Fun, guarding the doorway, is a J-CN construction robot. Think wrecking ball, with a brain. He has a focused, hyper low-frequency sonic generator that he uses to demolish buildings.

Vellum gave a cautious glance at the second gynoid looter. "And Lovely, there, is the same as you, Dee, another D-series Robohostess. Sorry. I guess you weren't as rare as you thought. Hmmm, I wonder what _she_ can do."

That question was soon answered in the form of a double-barreled device extending from the wrist of the criminal fembot.

Lovely pointed her wrist at Vellum and emitted a burst of light. Detecting the energy build-up prior to the shot, the librarian threw herself to the floor, as the ray flew over her, lanced into a series of metal shelves behind her, and split them apart with a v-shaped gash.

"Focused magnetic beam? That's new," Vellum muttered, while she got back on her feet.

Tactically, she was glad that the looter was concentrating on her, instead of the humans, which meant that she would have to take her own advice and distract, until something happened, for good or ill.

"Have a dose of LEMP, losers!" yelled the old Maurice, as she assumed a firing stance, opened thin nozzles from the underside of her wrists, and began to shoot controlled spurts of a blue liquid at Buzzy and Scooby, as they dodged and yelped.

Laughing, as the two robots ran to an area of the room that served as an office space, and took cover behind a dusty work desk, the gynoid looter hosed her targets' hiding place with the liquid, which splashed across the desktop, and ran messily down onto the floor and into some wastepaper baskets that flanked the desk.

"LEMP?" Marcie caught herself asking aloud.

Overhearing and confident that her prey wasn't going anywhere, the Marcie analog obliged her double with a proud explanation.

"Curious, human?" she asked, watching her. "It stands for Liquid EMP! Millions of microscopic electromagnetic generators in a highly conductive solution, stored in a pressurized, plastic tank. They arm and discharge a pulse every time they detect the impact of a splash, knocking out anything electronic. Since humans are organically electronic, too, I wonder what would happen if _they_ were splashed with this. I guess I'll have to satisfy my scientific curiosity with you."

In the time it took for the robot to boast about her weapon, Marcie, from below the edge of the Mark II's rim, was secretly readying her own. "Then, let's compare notes!"

She pulled out a small flask of acid from her low-slung utility belt, stood up, and threw it at her.

The bottle squarely crashed against the surprised robot, the clear liquid running down her face and upper chest. The Marcie analog, then cocked her head, in slight curiosity. "Hmm...Analyzing. H2SO4. Sulfuric acid? Nice. But, I handle volatile mixtures like that, all the time, so my housing is acid-proof."

"* _Buzz_ * But, not LEMP-proof!" yelled Buzzy, as he and an upright-standing Scooby, held small, plastic waste-paper baskets half-filled with dangerous LEMP.

"What? No!" the looter screamed.

They each gave a careful, yet forceful toss of the liquid at her, where it spilled all over her frightened body. Millions of generators released their relatively tiny charges, all at once, which built up to a powerful surge, blanketing her in a web of thin bolts that played across her metal skin.

To Marcie, Buzzy, and Scooby, it was morbidly fascinating, like watching someone being electrocuted, and then, with an acrid blue flash, she finally collapsed and became inert.

"Rrrighteous, Ruzzy!" Scooby barked, triumphantly.

Buzzy gave him a brisk rub on his head. "You * _buzz_ * said it, ol' pal o' mine! There's still some more of this stuff in these baskets. Let's go help the others!"

Vellum desperately pirouetted away from another blast from "Lovely's" magnetic beam shots, and as she spun, she noticed that she was closer to a work table than she was out in the open.

Then, she realized the tactic. Lovely was hedging her bets with Vellum. If she couldn't strike her down with a clean hit, then she would force her to move into a position to corner herself, then, cut her down.

Vellum wracked her brain for a solution. She couldn't keep dodging in this ever tightening space forever, and she couldn't try to run back out into the open. Either option invited a chance for a terminal blow.

Buzzy crept up behind the busy Lovely, and then stopped at a fair distance from her back. Vellum saw this occurring and correctly said nor did anything to give him away. In fact, she stopped moving, altogether, serving herself up as the perfect target.

Lovely gave a chuckle. "About time you stopped jumping around like an electron. In fact, I'll give you more electrons than you can handle."

She trained her weapon arm in Vellum's direction, locked her eyes on-target...and then, seized up like an engine with too little oil in it, as Buzzy gave a quick splash of LEMP across her back.

Knowing that she was attacked from behind, but too disabled to do anything about it, Lovely gave a fierce, final, spastic twist to face her attacker and blindly fired her charged-up shot, which Buzzy ducked, and the guarding J-CN caught full in the chest, knocking him back into the hallway, smoking and motionless. Then, she fell, sparking and motionless.

Freddy and Rev circled each other, but where one simply did so, defensively, the other, aggressively, did so to size him up.

Despite his chesty build, Freddy was not pugnacious by nature. His programming lent him to think in terms of building, not taking things apart. So, he found the impetus to do that hard to come by. He decided to talk sense into the wayward machine, instead.

"Listen, y'know this place is certainly big enough for both of us. My friends can explore it, and your friends can...loot it, I guess. So, how about it?"

Rev answered by socking Freddy in his jaw with enough force to send him crashing into a metal fabrication machine. He slumped, but kept his static-filled vision on Rev, as he marched towards him.

"Y'know," said Rev, torso panels sliding open, revealing thin, articulated, forward-reaching arms ending in ratchets and hydraulic shears, the gears in his fingers, hands, arms and shoulders whirring eagerly. "I never disassembled a pacifist before. After I'm done with you, maybe I'll work on that little Vellum unit, next. Should be fun."

So, caught up in his sadism, however, Rev didn't notice the diplomat leaving Freddy's eyes. In its place, sat the dispassionate, coldness of a machine set to a single mode: reverse-engineering.

Freddy stood up and ran towards Rev in a one motion. He didn't know what Freddy was going to do, so he stopped cautiously, and brought his thick arms up for defense, but not entirely high enough.

Freddy, however, was all offense, swinging _his_ heavy arms up underneath Rev's spindly work appendages and low arms, catching him off-guard. They tore up and away from Rev's body, like branches from a dead tree, and struck Rev's arms upward with such force that his own fists connected with his eyes, cracking one and punching the other out of alignment.

Rev staggered back, doubled over from the ocular damage, trying to gauge where Freddy was, and trying not to feel any more of a fool for being so flat-footed like that. But, it didn't matter, in the end.

Freddy diverted a sizable amount of kilo-wattage into his leg motors and gave Rev a solid kick in his midsection, making the looter roll and tumble backwards, until he crashed into the doorframe of the workshop's entrance, then bounced halfway out of the threshold.

Wondering why he didn't see his sentry by the doorway, Rev weakly raised his head and saw his guard laying on his side, like a burnt-out, iron-clad egg, strobe-lighting the corridor with his sparking wound.

The threshold suddenly grew dark with the presence of Freddy and his gang.

"Y'know," Freddy said, proudly looking down at his handiwork. "I never beat up a looter who threatened my friends before. Didn't even need my tools. Kinda neat, really."

Rev croaked a response through his vocabulator. "Others...wait...miss...us...and search..."

He tried to compute what he did wrong in the fight, but then, his brain automatically went into Sleep Mode to make repairs, and the looter simply shut down.

* * *

Spring gave a heavy sigh, as their robotic protectors walked back into the room. "Well, that was entertaining, and all, but the Mark II can't fix itself, although, that's not a bad design feature for the next version. In any event, these repairs and calibrations will still take some time.

"How much time?" Red asked.

"A couple of days, perhaps. With the equipment in this workshop and some power, that would be a best-case scenario."

"Well, what do we do, now?" fretted Jason.

"Normally, when a crew is overdue for a return to Sundial, they would send another T.H.R.O.B.A.C. to retrieve them, tracking them down with its own built-in Bloodhound," Spring explained.

Marcie felt a "...but" arriving, so she headed it off. " _But_..."

"But," Spring continued, glumly. "Our t-sigs were never saved in Sundial's database, so there's no way they could find us. We have to make it back, on our own. At least, if worse comes to worse, we can activate the Cocoon, and get put under."

"Cocoon?" asked Marcie. "What's that?"

"An artificially created bubble of anti-time, an emergency stasis field that stops time within it and protects the crew. It's the best, if not last, line of defense while they wait for a rescue. We could do that."

"But, then who'll fix the ship if we're all in nap time?" asked Daisy.

"I think we can help you with that," Dee said to them. "Freddy found this old brain-taping machine. If we can get it, and the power, up and running again, we could transfer your memories and personalities into those looters."

Amongst the consternation and questions, Marcie, incredulously, asked them, "Wait! You mean you can _do_ that?"

"Oh, yeah. * _Buzz_ * It was a popular human fad in the past," Buzzy gave a reply.

"A fad?" Daisy asked, intrigued. "What does it do?"

"Fad. Noun," Vellum explained in misunderstanding. "A custom that many people have an interest in for a short period of time. From the Brit-"

"No, no," Daisy amended. "I mean, what did this _fad_ do?"

Vellum grinned, sheepishly. "Oh, sorry. It records your thoughts, your memories and personalities, and either saves them, or transfers them into another brain, or computer. Humans though these were great at parties, until they would get drunk, switch brains with each other, too much, and wake up the next day not knowing who they were."

"But, switching places with those criminals?" Spring asked in reflexive disgust. "Why on Earth would we want to do that?"

"Their leader just said that others were waiting outside," Freddy reported. "They might look for them, here, if they're missed, and we won't be able to stand up to all of them. If you become them, for a little while, you could pass for them and tell them that there wasn't anything worth taking in here."

"But there were only four of those guys, and five of us," Jason pointed out. "Who stays human, and...probably starves?"

The teens worryingly looked at each other, wondering who would youthfully blurt out that they would do it, forgetting that they didn't know the first thing about time machine repair, and thus, bringing back to this sorry state.

" _I'll_ do it," Dr. Spring told them, soberly. "I'm the only one qualified to make these kinds of repairs, and I can keep an eye out for more of these looters. In fact, I might even need you teens to go get parts for me to help in the repairs."

"Sounds like a plan," Marcie concurred, dropping her suspicions about him, for the moment.

_'Even he couldn't make a way out of this that could only benefit him, could he?'_ she wondered. "How do we keep in touch?

"All robots have an inner radio and a database of contacts," Freddy instructed. "When you transfer into the looters, we'll show you how to delete the rest of the looter contacts, so you can just call us and yourselves."

"Then, that's that. We'll help you put this brain-switcher back together, and then..." gulped Marcie. "We'll...become robots."


	7. Chapter 7

It was a falling rush to unconsciousness, like being submerged into the depths of REM sleep in the span of seconds. Then, after an eternity of thoughtlessness, came the accelerated semblance of coming up to the surface of a deep, black mental lake.

Data from equilibrium sensors told Marcie that she was moving, being taken somewhere, but not on her own accord, so she opened her eyes, or rather, her mind interpreted the action of fully coming online as something humanly reminiscent as "waking up."

She thought about checking to see if she were, physically, all right. Suddenly, instead of a usual sense of self-awareness, a program ran. From a corner of her vision, she was surprised to see a heads-up display flicker into view, and then a glowing outline of her body appeared.

She gave a momentary doubt to her mental state, and a text displayed that all of her software was running within normal parameters.

She lifted up a hand, experimentally, to see it. Then, she felt the all too human queasiness of becoming the unfamiliar, the alien...the mechanized.

Metallic with the dull shine of daily use, the appendage was, indeed, human-shaped and mechanical, with servos smoothly flexing the fingers with her every errant thought to do so.

Worries about the condition of her body prompted the HUD text to inform her, after a moment of checking, that her body, subsystems and tools were in working order, from her human-range sensor suite, to her Chemix Analysis and Fabrication System.

Curious as to what that was, she thought about it. Two panels clicked and whirred opened from her torso, freeing two cylindrical frameworks that held several narrow, upright tanks, some plastic, some metal, in a motorized lazy Susan set-up.

Situated where her stomach would have been, was a powerful device that worked in conjunction with the two revealed tank storage systems, a combination of a pump, mixer, and centrifuge.

Somehow, she knew that an intake tube, built into the index finger of one hand, drew liquid, via vacuum, into the abdominal mixer/pump, which then fed into a network of tubes connected to the tanks. Those tanks, in turn, could be selected, by her, to feed into an outlet nozzle which rested in a space under her wrist.

Knowing all of that, Marcie soon realized who she was, or rather, what machine she was in.

"Maurice..." Marcie muttered.

"Hey, look who finally woke up!" said a voice. The servos underneath Marcie's head turned it towards that and the intimate sound of quiet cheers. She jumped at the sight of what surrounded her. Or, rather, what didn't surround her.

She was carried aloft in the crowded, open-air cargo bed of a run-down, flying transport, of some fashion, and every passenger, there, was vaguely recognizable, but, physically, wasn't the least bit human.

Sitting on one side of the platform was the RE-V, lounging next to the wayward D-series that attacked Vellum. His head was crowned with a curly mass of red wires that seemed to have exploded from the top of his head. Both sat as relaxed as robots could be, with the RE-V, or "Red", pumping his metal fist in the air triumphantly, while "Daisy" chuckled at his reaction.

"How do you feel, Marcie?" asked Daisy.

Marcie answered slowly, coming to terms with her rebirth. "I...feel okay. I guess." She stiffened in shock to the sound of her voice. It sounded feminine, maybe even similar, to her human one, but there was a distant, synthetic tone to it, one that she would have to adjust to. " _That_ sounded strange. Are you guys all right?"

The duo nodded, and Jason, who was parked next to Marcie in the guise of the J-CN construction machine, answered. "We're okay. It took us a little while to get used to this, but, so far, we've managed to survive the transfer."

Marcie gave an inward frown from his choice of the word, "survive," but then reminded herself that she, too, was feeling fine, or nominal, all things considered.

Then, she remembered that when she turned to hear Jason, she heard the soft sound of clacks behind her. Experimentally, she softly shook her head again and heard the sound once more.

"What's that sound?" she asked.

"Oh, that's probably the connections from the loose wiring from your head," Jason said.

"Loose wiring...from my head?" Marcie asked, nervously. "And why isn't my...wiring...in my head?"

"Well, the brain-taping machine was old, so it didn't have the ports and connectors that robots use, today. That's why both you and Red had to have your computer brains wired directly to the machine. Sorry we couldn't put the wiring back, but there was so much of it, we figured that it couldn't hurt to leave it out. I even painted it brown like your old hair, so you wouldn't feel so bad."

Marcie gently ran her fingers through the kinky tangle of wires, and had to chuckle to herself at the parody of her erstwhile human look.

"Thanks, Jason. So, where are we headed, now?"

"We're on our way to their town, Crystalex!" Daisy called out, eagerly.

Marcie nodded. "I've got to admit, I'm pretty curious. Since this is an alternate universe, it'll be fascinating to see how close it is to our own town."

Red, who had his head swiveled to watch the alien horizon, didn't pay much attention to Marcie's contemplations, but reared up and pointed to something below and in the distance. "Whatever! Check it out, guys! I think we're here!"

The rest of the gang stepped and rolled over to the edge where Red was pointing over, to see a steel city spread wide and hugging the coast of what would have been the Pacific Ocean. What wasn't encroaching beach was extended, glistening promenade that gave the city commanding views of the sea. Though not nearly as large as other metropolises, to the newcomers, the "town" was breathtaking.

Marcie, herself, had to look at what she was becoming through this act of rebellion and what she left behind. Before, she was a daughter, a student, an employee, a budding scientist, and a social outcast. Then, she became more than that, a detective, a thorn in the side of evil, and even a friend to others. And now, as she felt the transport begin a banking approach to the ground, she would be a rescuer, a time traveler, and an explorer of other worlds.

She didn't know what The Performer in her felt like, but in her heart, Marcie knew that she came a very long way, and the horizon that she gazed upon, would be the beginning of many horizons to come.

_'Crystalex...'_ she thought, comforted by her introspection, and also, the camaraderie that came from the company of her friends, as well. _'I think I might feel like my old self, again,'_

* * *

The town, long ago christened, Crystalex, overlooked the coast of that world's California analog, Calcufornia, and the western ocean, whose name was lost in the mists of time and geographical expediency.

Crystalex started life as just another factory complex, extracting minerals from the abundant sea, and manufacturing highly efficient crystalline-based components that captured and held memory without significant sub-atomic degradation, that long resulted in the robotic equivalent of memory loss.

Sometime, in its history, it was decided to add more residences to the complex, saving them from having its workers having to commute, by simply living there.

Such a plan had been implemented on other facilities before, transforming them into the "towns" and "cities" of that ilk, and Crystalex would be no exception. With a machine population that grew into the thousands, the town flourished, actually improving on the quality of its initial product, and thus, joined its sister towns in earning its municipal keep.

Nine robots stood off from the moving promenade that led other mechanical patrons to the large, domed building, ahead.

Marcie absently looked up to read the bold, holographic signage that orbited the building's domed roof and flashed to entice the curious, and her stomach, involuntarily, gave a guilty hop. The words, Futuristic Leisure Entertainment Access Computer Hall, winked and unfurled above, but it was the acronym that the first letters made, that struck her.

"FLEACH?" she figured, with a forlorn sigh. Success in public service, whether in entertainment, like her father, or in scientific endeavors and amateur criminal deduction, like Marcie, was in a Fleach's blood, even worlds away.

But pride didn't rise in her heart because of it. It was too full of wistful moments of family connection, shattered, like thin crystal, by Winslow's hurtful estrangement. She wished that he could see that, when it came to their goals and desires, he and Marcie were more alike than he realized.

She still hadn't heard from him in all the time she had been staying with The Dinkleys, and she feared that he didn't care what happened to her, one way, or the other.

If he hated her, but wouldn't disown her, she would rather that was so. Better to be scorned, she felt, than to live without even the barest of family ties.

"You're telling me that it's all in here?" Red asked, huffily. "I thought you said this town had cool places to go."

"It does." Dee said, happily. "This is it, a Futuristic Leisure Entertainment Access Computer Hall. Every town has one. It's bigger in most cities, but this one's pretty good. C'mon, let go in before they run out of terminals!"

"Terminals? Ugh! This is what happens when the nerds take over," Red sighed, as he followed everyone else inside.

The doors slid aside, blasting the visitors in a wash of beeps, bloops, buzzing, and the rising and the falling hubbub of patrons enjoying themselves. The interior was a spacious throwback to early video game arcades in the 80's, with all of the noise and flashing lights the senses could handle. However, for all of the grandeur of an arcade there was one thing that was missing-the games.

Enclosed booths stood alongside open-air models, where laughing robots sat, laced with cables attaching them to the booths' seating. Recharge stations awaited automata who wanted a quick boost of energy before eagerly getting into the booths, once more.

"What do you do here?" Daisy asked.

"You * _buzz_ * plug in, man," said Buzzy. "It's the coolest thing in DR."

"DR? Don't you mean VR?" Marcie asked, internalizing her father issues, for the moment.

"Nope," Freddy said. "DR. _Digital_ Reality. You plug into the hall's mainframe through these booths, and you can tell it to create any world you want to be in. Become anything you want to be, too. A deep-space combat unit in the middle of a desperate war, the leader of your own galactic government, heck, you can even pretend to be humans again, for a little while."

"Hmm, normally we would have to wear special visors to experience something similar," Marcie supposed. "But, I guess, since we're machines, the interface between our computer brains and this DR mainframe should feel seamless when we plug in."

"Okay, then!" Daisy said to her. "Let's stop figuring it out and let's see where this'll take us."

"Anywhere you want, actually," said Vellum. "If you can think it, the mainframe can build it for you. Come on, let's find some booths."

* * *

The landscape was an unassuming one, a non-descript American city. However, the scenario wasn't so unassuming.

A pair of large combat androids, as tall as a small, one-story building, were marching a column of captive, bedraggled citizens through a block at gunpoint. The block, as well as the rest of downtown, displayed the signs of a destructive battle, cratered streets and walkways, burnt-out, perforated ruins that were once buildings, and crushed or abandoned vehicles littering the area.

As the sad procession walked by, two of those abandoned vehicles, a red, modified motorcycle, and a blue and green VW van, stirred to life behind it.

The van's body and motorcycle's chassis retracted tires and extended limbs from the front fork, split apart hinged, armored panels into fold-away sections, swung fairing free and tucked away radiator grill, revealing the true and vital machinery underneath, as they began to stand up behind the captors.

When it was done, two similar sized robots stood in a relaxed, yet offensive stance to the vulnerable rears of the other two machines.

"Hey," announced Red the motorcycle. He waited until the opponents turned to face them before he gave the closet one a Haymaker that sent his target stumbling off to the side of the street and fall like a tree against the side of a building. A quick burst of fire from the pair of guns hidden inside his fairing-chest, dispatched it, soon after.

The van, for his part, raised an arm, which opened a port above the wrist, and fired something that, at first sight, looked like two projectiles.

In actuality, this was a bola, whose length whipped open, as it whirled and traveled towards the second target. It entangled the opponent easily, and when the two heavy ends of the bola touched, it released a charge of electricity, so high and savage, the enemy's, otherwise sealed, electrical systems were literally fried.

"That's eight, so far," commented Freddy, as he watched the people below him cheer their freedom and their saviors. "It shouldn't be long before the enemy starts sending out patrols to hunt us down for saving the citizens."

A grin grew on Red's faceplate in anticipation. "I sure hope so."

* * *

The warehouse was quiet, dusty and vast.

The woman, clad in her sexy, high-leg over-alls, utility belt, backpack and climbing boots, crept through the aisles of old, damaged boxes and crates, moved among the pests that made their homes, here, and skirted past the island piles of cast-off automotive and household junk.

Sunlight shown through the building's dingy, cracked windows as diffuse beams, illuminating free-floating clouds of dust motes that hung in the still, musty air.

However, for Daisy Blake, in her fantasy role as antique archaeologist Sara Cross, the Room Picker, she knew that activity, either subtle or gross, always happened in an, otherwise, silent warehouse.

Her nose picked up the earthy hint of leather, and it alarmed her. Usually, she could find old leathers in places like this. Vintage shoes and aviator caps, forgotten catcher's mitts, or old motorcyclist's riding gear. But, the scent, here, was fresher, newer than that, and thus, gave the whole game away.

"Okay, Picarino!" she called out, stopping by another island of rusting, vintage car parts. "I know you're in here!"

A man in a white suit and hat, with exquisitely tailored, matching, leather boots, stepped into an aisle across from her position, along with two of his hired thugs.

"Ah, Sara," he purred in smooth Italian-accented English. "We keep meeting in the strangest places. How ever did you know I was here, by the way?"

"You're a thief, you plagiarize every archaeology paper you've ever written, and you cheat at card games," Sara explained. "But the one thing you do well, you peacock, is care for your clothes, especially those _leather_ boots of yours."

Picarino smiled. "Guilty. Now, on to business. A petroliana buyer that crossed my path recently is rather interested in, perhaps, the only surviving advertisement of Salvage Sam's The Cast-off Queen, in existence. Rumor has it that it's here, someplace."

"Rumor's got nothing to do with it, Pic," Sara said. "I know that your goons tried to steal my map of the place."

Picarino thoughtfully pursed his lips at that. "Hmm. True. True. They were, however, able to remember the address of the warehouse from seeing it, and so, here we are."

He glanced over to his men. "Get her and bring me the map!"

The two men began to walk out of the aisle, gloved hands eager to bring a painful demise to the heroine.

Sara had expected this.

She reached into the utility belt that adorned her over-alls and pulled free a length of strong cord, headed with a small grapple. Then, she twisted her body to face the huge pile, lashed the grapple to the top of it, and waited for one dangerous moment.

The thugs, seeing her attach the cord to the pile, surmised that she intended to climb it to evade them.

In their minds, this was essentially a very suicidal game of King of the Mountain. She would be trapped at the top, waiting for this murderous duo to pull her down. So, they happily increased the speed of their gait.

When they exited the aisle and into the light of day, Sara struck fast.

With a yank and an evasive hop to the side, she pulled the apex of the mound of heavy parts down upon a surprised pair of hired killers, their bodies getting battered, held down and, ultimately, buried under an avalanche of weighty, hazardous metal.

As the landslide of junk began to subside over the perilously pinned men, Sara could see something incongruous among the derelict auto parts. A small head wreathed in a crown of tiny gears was revealed.

Sara climbed the flattening mound and began to dig around the head, deeper and deeper, until, at last, enough detritus was cleared away for her to grasp the head and neck of the small statue of a gowned woman holding a large wrench, and pull the whole thing free from the base of the pile, as if she were young Arthur releasing Excalibur from the stone.

"The Cast-Off Queen!" Picarino gasped. "That's why you stood by that pile! You _knew_ it was in there!"

"Yep," Sara said with a jaunty wave and a smile. "And thanks to your two friends, there, you made me think of a faster way to uncover it, and create two new openings for your employees. I'll see you around, Pic!"

As Sara turned and jogged out of the warehouse, in triumph, she could hear the satisfying sound of a distraught Ambrose Picarino scream to the rafters, "I'll get the better of you, yet, Sara Cross!"

* * *

The moment Marcie plugged into the system, she found herself rushing into a void of directionless white. There was no sense of herself; all she could do was ride the digital path being paved by the facility's main computer, and hope that it was taking her somewhere safe.

It wasn't long before her identity and awareness, but not her form, coalesced into a familiar space, or rather, a familiar memory...

_She had heard of it, even seen pictures of it, but nothing prepared her for the sensation of actually being in a summer science camp. Before then, the only non-scholastic outdoor activity little Marcie Fleach, age seven, ever done was visit her father in his park, and take in an occasional ride or three._

_Here, things were different. Parents were gone, replaced by their strangely ebullient surrogates, the camp counselors. Home was an unfamiliar cabin in an unfamiliar, and quite possibly, unforgiving, setting, the woods._

_Looking uncertain of things, she followed the other kids out of the camp bus, picked up her tagged luggage that sat on the ground by the side of the vehicle, and schlepped to her assigned cabin._

_Hours later, when she had a chance to rest and acclimate herself to her new environs, Marcie was told that she was to bring her experiment she was told to bring to the building that served as the camp's indoor gym._

_After changing into her camp attire of a t-shirt and shorts, and studying the map that stood in front of the main office, she brought a smaller suitcase into the gym and suddenly, strangely, felt at home._

_Tables had been set up in a wide semi circle around the periphery of the gymnasium, and on the tables were various and varying buzzing, bubbling, cranking, and blinking experiments brought by the other campers._

_A counselor appeared behind Marcie and pointed to a bare spot next to an open laptop that stood behind a folded place card._

_"Hello there, Marcie. I see that you brought your experiment along. That's good," replied the worker, as he walked her to that specific table. "We always have this science fair to start off camp, every year. It helps get the other kids motivated about the activities that we have planned. Now, I have you next to a real go-geter. Watch your back."_

_The counselor said that to be jocular, but what he didn't know was that Marcie was no slouch, herself. When people, and even parents, disappointed her, she could always step into her own mind, and science, in this case, chemistry, was the gateway to that._

_She knew that she wanted to be the best at it, if she was going to get the most people to acknowledge her young worth. In a fairly success-driven family, an oft-lonely Marcie, like them, equated personal accomplishments with enjoyment and social connection to others._

_She placed the case on the floor below her spot on the table, opened it and began taking out the glassware and containers of a strange fluid of her making, to set up on the table. When she was finished connecting everything and checking the formula she scrawled in her clipboard for any flaws, she noticed someone appear to her side._

_A bespectacled girl, standing slightly shorter than Marcie, and coiffed with short, bobbed and bowed hair, reached over and typed quickly upon the laptop's keys until a window was displayed and she was satisfied._

_Seeing the girl as an immediate rival made Marcie glance critically at the clunky computer that display the girl's program, a string of numbers that filled the screen and gradually scrolled down to make room for the next string, and the next._

_Even though she didn't want to say anything that would give her competition an edge, curiosity prompted Marcie to ask the girl, "What's that doing?"_

_The girl glanced back at Marcie and answered, guardedly, "It's calculating Pi to the last digit. I want to see how long it'll take until it crashes from errors caused by overwork, so I can make better programs that will, in turn, make better processors." She nodded at the percolating chemistry set-up in front of Marcie. "What's that?"_

_"I'm creating a fluid that will freeze in room temperature. It'll be a great coolant for machines or spaceships, or it could be used by hospitals to preserve limbs and organs faster."_

_Marcie secretly thought that improving computers by testing their computational limits wasn't a bad idea. Computers and chemistry did work, famously, hand-in-hand, but she wouldn't acknowledge this girl's effort. It would make her feel good, and thus, might make her win!_

_Marcie shrugged her shoulders and said, non-committally, "Oh, okay."_

_The girl understood the gesture, remembered that Marcie was_ her _rival, as well, and muttered, "I'll probably win, though."_

_Marcie stiffened at that. She knew a challenge when she heard one. "What makes you so sure that_ you'll _win?"_

_The girl suddenly found her voice and said with a casual boldness, "Because, everyone needs computers. We only need chemicals when it's convenient."_

_"Well, you wouldn't have your fancy computers without the polymers and other chemicals that make its components!" Marcie huffed._

_"Oh, yeah! How could you make your chemicals without computers?"_

_"Chemists have been making chemicals long_ before _computers, four-eyes!"_

_The girl looked at her faux-pas in shock. "We're_ both _wearing glasses, you dumb lab assistant"_

_"Oh, yeah. I forgot," Marcie amended, sheepishly, being caught up in the moment. She soon reengaged. "Well, who are you calling a lab assistant, you IT intern?"_

_And so it went. Both girls were so focused on their bickering and flinging challenges at each other, that they hadn't noticed two counselors proceed to lead the two out of the gym to cool off._

_"Wait a minute," the girl said, being the first to realize, moments later, where they were. "Look what you did. They kicked us out of the competition!"_

_"Whatever," Marcie sulked. She glanced through the doorway of the building to see a woman counselor standing in the center of the gym holding a portable rig of some sort, as a demonstration. "Hey, check that out."_

_The rig looked like a flattened, jury-rigged version of a cd player with a large microphone attached, however, the braided lengths of wiring that led from the device to a harness she wore made from a school backpack wired with used speakers, gave a clue to the nature of the thing._

_After fiddling with the device's controls, a sound like distorted birdsong issued from the backpack. Soon, after that, the two girls and the onlookers were surprised to see a flurry of small songbirds fly into the room through the doorway._

_Another warble from the backpack, and the birds wheeled around in a tight formation high over the grinning worker's head. The pack chirped once more, and with a point of her finger, the birds accelerated out of the doorway to the applause of campers and fellow counselors alike._

_The fair continued for the better part of an hour, with the counselors going through the rounds of inspecting and asking about the campers' creations before they were allowed to display them in the center of the gym._

_In the end, three ribbons were awarded to the winning competitors, something the two dejected girls outside weren't at all surprised about._

_"Subliminal programming via manipulated sound waves, probably," the smaller girl hypothesized._

_"Maybe," Marcie, begrudgingly, agreed._

_"I wasn't talking to you," the other girl, haughtily, said to Marcie, as if she were upset that Marcie eavesdropped on her._

_"I thought you were talking to me," Marcie explained._

_"Well, I wasn't."_

_"Don't talk so loud, then," Marcie offered, coolly. They quickly resumed their glaring stare contest._

_"So, what are you supposed to be, anyway?" Marcie asked the girl. "Some kind of hacker?"_

_"What are_ you _supposed to be?" the girl with the bobbed and bowed hair asked back. "Some kind of mad scientist?"_

_They stared, suspiciously, at one another, for a long moment, trying to maintain the, now awkward, feeling of stand-offish-ness that they thought was standard operating procedure between competitors, before the moment, finally, could hold the tension no more._

_It was a summer camp. They were cabin mates. Acting like super-serious grown-ups over what was a friendly competition that they both lost, felt both ridiculous and false to their young world-view._

_Seeing how silly they were both behaving, the staring soon broke down into lop-sided smiling, and the smiles soon transformed into sweet, liberating laughter. They both stepped closer and shook hands._

_"Hi," the girl introduced herself. "I'm Velma Dinkley, hacker-in-training."_

_"I'm Marcie Fleach, fledgling mad scientist," she said with a polite nod. "Pleased to meet you..."_


	8. Chapter 8

_A week had passed, and it had rained the night before, and so, the earth gave up her heady scents, the next day, in the deep wood, where two bespectacled, little girls walked and explored._

_As the breezes made the boughs of the pine forests sing softly, one of the girls spoke up._

_"You shouldn't have walked out here without the counselors knowing where you were," Velma cautioned._

_"I'm just curious, that's all. Aren't you?" Marcie said, stepping over a tree root. "That counselor was able to control all of those birds. It blew what I had right out of the water."_

_"So? Are you jealous?"_

_"No way! But, didn't you hear around the camp? People are starting to miss things, like personal stuff. I saw a bird fly out of someone's cabin windows, today. Plus, I saw her going into the woods, so I'm following her. Besides, you didn't have to come out here, y'know."_

_"I know. I just didn't want you getting lost." Velma admitted. "Y'know, I think we could've won second place if, maybe, we, y'know, combined our experiments, instead of doing them separately, like the counselors wanted."_

_Marcie stopped marching long enough to seriously consider that notion. "Yeah, we could've. Tell you what. The next time there's a science fair, we should totally do that, y'know, to increase our chances of winning."_

_Velma gave an appreciative smile at that. Whether it was for the opportunity to win in that manner, or just for the opportunity to explore science and work together, she didn't have time to ponder, because Marcie raised a hand in alarm._

_"Wait!" Marcie said. "I hear something!"_

_The sound of, at least, ten birds chirping all at once was more cacophonous, than melodious, as Marcie and Velma carefully peered around a nearby tree to look in on what was causing them to sing so._

_In a small clearing, they could see the counselor wearing her invention once more. Songbirds of various species were flitting and zipping overhead, dropping necklaces, wallets, and other small booty by her feet, while she gave a satisfied chuckle._

_"Not a bad haul, my little ones. Not bad, at all. My animal controller worked like a charm. I can't wait until I get back home and really get the bugs out, so I can give it a proper test."_

_She, then heard the pitch of the birds' singing suddenly change. A communal warning. Something unfamiliar was detected, and the direction of the new song was towards the nearby periphery of the clearing._

_The counselor gave an annoyed smirk. "Looks like I'll get my test, after all," she muttered, then, yelled into the woods, "My friends just ratted you out, you little snoops! Come on out, or I'll make my feathered friends think you're either a threat, or prey!"_

_Reluctantly, Marcie and Velma stepped out from the shade of the forest to confront the woman, while songbirds circled around them, overhead._

_"You're those two girls who were kicked out last week!" the criminal counselor laughed. "Sorry you two came in dead last!"_

_"That's not why we're here," Marcie spoke up. "You're controlling those birds to steal, aren't you?"_

_The woman straightened with a dark sense of pride. "Got it in one! My hubby's an ornithologist. That's a scientist that-"_

_"Studies birds," Velma finished in deadpan. "We know what an ornithologist is."_

_The worker rolled her eyes at the interruption. "Anyway, he researches birds' behavior through their songs, so_ I _researched on the birds in this area, took one of his recordings of those species, altered their sound, subliminally, before I left home, and played it back, to control them. Pretty clever, huh?"_

_"Yeah!" Velma, honestly, agreed. "But, it's still crazy! Why are you doing all of that, when you could use that to tell them to help people."_

_The woman smirked. "What makes you think I won't? When they're not giving me cool stuff, I can always control them to help people...for a price. But, that's not all I can make them do, of course."_

_With a few twists of the controller's knobs, the counselor played a warbling, high-pitched song from the speakers in her backpack. All at once, the birds stopped circling and began to swoop upon the two girls._

_"What are you doing?" Marcie screamed, while she warded away the attack runs with frantic waves of her arms._

_"Yeah!" Velma yelled, swatting at the wayward avians. "I thought you weren't going to have them attack, if we came out!"_

_"What can I say? I'm a liar, too," the woman said, simply, not believing that her victims were this gullible. "I can't have you telling the counselors what I've been doing. But, don't worry. I'll just say that you were eaten by a bear, or something. It's gotta be better than the truth. You being_ pecked _to death."_

_"Run!" Velma yelled to Marcie, as she bolted back into the woods, Marcie following hard on her friend's heels to the sound of the counselor's triumphant cackling..._

* * *

_Fear guided the girls' desperate paths through the forest, and as a flock of tiny birds maneuvered through the trees towards their prey, chaotically slow death would soon follow._

_Marcie tried to stay in sight of Velma as she ran, her friend, weaving and speeding through the woods, as if there was nothing in her way._

_"Wow, V!" she quipped, breathlessly. "For a nerd, you sure can run!"_

_"For a geek, you sure can keep up!" Velma quipped back from up ahead, then asked, "Are they still behind us?"_

_"I can still hear them!" Marcie reported. "But, I think I've got something that might get us out of this jam!"_

_Still moving, Marcie reached into the pocket of her camp shorts and clumsily pulled out a small, round ball. Looking at it, momentarily, however, made her lose her footing on the uneven earth._

_With a whoop, she tripped over a half-buried tree root and crashed into a tumble on the ground, the ball rolling free and ahead of her._

_Velma heard the fall, stopped, and turned back, hearing the mad chirping getting closer and louder, as she returned to a still prone Marcie._

_"Marcie, are you alright?" she asked. Marcie pointed to the ground by Velma's feet._

_Velma looked down to see the round object resting. "What is it?"_

_"A pepper bomb!" Marcie told her. "Get it!"_

_Reaching down to grasp it, and hearing the screaming birds above them, Velma asked, "What do I do with it?"_

_"Throw it hard on the ground and move away!" Marcie instructed her._

_Velma dashed the device into the dirt, where it hit a hard patch of earth and cracked apart. Under pressure from a tiny compressed-air pellet, the bomb released a stinging, choking cloud of red pepper dust, that was caught on the wind and, luckily, blown up in the direction of the brainwashed birds._

_Velma turned to evade the cloud, but an errant breeze blew some particles of the dust into her face, stinging her eyes and making her cough._

_Blinded, she tripped over Marcie's feet and fell on the ground, her glasses tumbling free._

_"Ow! I-I hurt my arm!" she wailed, as avian pandemonium took place above them._

_The fiery dust motes clung onto the eyes and inflamed the nostrils and lungs of the little birds, causing them to veer off wildly into the skies, the spell over them broken by the sheer pain of the deterrent._

_Marcie, seeing that it was safe to take action with the birds fleeing the scene, stood up and helped Velma to her feet._

_"I've got you. C'mon. I'll take you to the lake. We're not that far."_

_Velma, her eyes shut tight and watering, felt a hand gently hold her by the waist and guide her through the wooded terrain and her own anxiety. She had never been attacked before, never faced possible death so far from home before. It seriously unnerved her._

_But this person who she once saw as a rival, was facing that same fear with her, taking the time to help her, being her friend. Despite the pain in her eyes and the hammering of her heart, Velma trusted where Marcie was taking her, and felt very safe with her._

_It wasn't long before Velma could smell water and hear it lap against the shore. She gave a slight smile to herself, as her faith in steady Marcie was rewarded._

_"Okay, V," Marcie said. "We're by the lake."_

_She took Velma by the hand and they both knelt by the shore's wet edge. She, then cupped her friend's hands into the cool water and allowed her to splash it into her aching eyes._

_Every time Velma needed more water, and couldn't see where to gather it, Marcie would take Velma's trembling hands into her own, and guide them into the water, again._

_This went on for a few minutes, until Velma, finally, told her that her eyes were feeling better. She opened them, and the world looked as if she were seeing it through greasy, out-of-focus cellophane._

_"Oh! My glasses!" Velma fretted. "I can't see a thing without them!"_

_"I hear you. I'm lost without mine, too," Marcie said to her, conversationally, while reaching into a back pocket_

_Velma began to think of where in the forest she had lost her spectacles, when a blurry shadow moved into her view, startling her. She felt something slipping onto her face, and then the world became clearer to her, once more, with the smiling face of Marcie being the first thing she saw._

_"My glasses! Marcie, thank you!" Velma cried, giving her a quick hug._

_"No problem, V," Marcie said, nervously trying to wave the gratitude away, but failing to fight the pink creeping across her cheeks._

_While both took a breather and sat on their knees by the water's edge, Marcie looked down to where a patch of Velma's arm skin was rubbed raw._

_"How does your arm feel?" she asked._

_"Still hurts."_

_"Let me see."_

_Velma gingerly offered her forearm to Marcie, who held it carefully for inspection. Marcie reached a hand into the lake and gathered some of its water to cool and clean the wound._

_She saw Velma's pained look, eventually, began to ease as the pain subsided. "How's that?"_

_"It feels much better," Velma breathed. She was about to stand, when Marcie held the arm a moment more, saying, "Hold it."_

_She bent over and gave the scrape a quick peck. Velma blinked and looked at the arm, as though it were newly given, and gave a smile to Marcie's ministrations._

_"My mom would kiss my boo-boos when I hurt myself, sometimes," Marcie said, nervously._

_Understanding the gesture, Velma said to her, "Mine, too. Thanks for helping me, back there."_

_Marcie gave an uncontrolled blush at the gratitude. "No problem, V, and thank you for using my Discourager prototype. I think it tested well."_

_With a laugh to shake off the nerves the girls felt at their close call with the birds, they stood, brushed themselves off, and walked back to the campsite, enjoying each others' company and planning on how to tell the head counselor about the mystery of the_ crooked _counselor they had just solved together..._

* * *

"A friend of yours?" Vellum asked, her image appearing over by a tree that grew by the lake.

"My best friend," Marcie's disembodied voice said, wistfully. Her mechanical body gradually appeared, standing on the shore, staring at the girls' footprints in the wet sand.

"I would have thought to see you in a lab," said Vellum. "A forest, huh? We don't see too many of them, these days."

"Camp Linnaeus, a science summer camp," Marcie explained with a thoughtful smile. "I met V for the first time, there. I think about it sometimes, but I never thought I could reminisce about it in high definition before. It's obvious that this mainframe could read my subconscious, as well as, conscious mind to fulfill my illusions."

"I know," Vellum said, proudly. "Great, isn't it?"

Marcie gave a look at herself and thought of her human body. In seconds, her flesh and clothes appeared in place of her metal hull.

"Couldn't wait to get back into your old duds, huh?" Vellum asked. "Don't worry. You'll be back in your old body before long."

"Yeah, I know," Marcie said, absently thinking of home and her laboratory.

With that whim, the forest of her past melted back into the mists of her personal history, and the interior and shapes of a room, her home laboratory, began to resolve.

She looked around at the scuffed and scratched black-topped work table, the dusty blackboard in the rear, the shelving with a myriad bottles of colorful liquids waiting to be mixed into the conventional, and maybe even, the unconventional. Even her cd player sat on its, otherwise unoccupied, lab stool.

Vellum gave the room a critical perusal and tried to hide her disappointment. "You know, you _could_ make yourself a better lab. Just saying."

"I've been trying to do that my whole life," Marcie admitted, ignoring the veiled critique, and still being impressed at the amount of detail pulled from her naked mind to create this environment. "Here goes."

The lab began to fade, transforming into a white, illusory fog of graphical de-resolution flowing out and away from the two. Soon, the fog rose and solidified into a much wider space, adorned with computers dedicated to chemical matters, clean, virginal centrifuges and spectrographic analyzers, all up-to-date, state-of-art, and waiting for Marcie's practiced touch.

Marcie gave a eager grin, thoughts of mad science and alchemy dancing delightfully in her mind.

"Only one more thing more to make it complete," she said to herself, while giving Vellum a thoughtful glance. A glance Vellum noticed.

"What? Why are you looking at me?" Vellum asked. The answer was quickly forthcoming. " _Oh!_ "

Vellum's image was softly lit with the digital busywork of the mainframe, softening her features, sealing the surface details of her plating and smoothing everything, until, finally, the familiar build of Velma Dinkley was beholden to Marcie, whose heart thumped at the completion of the fantasy.

"Your friend, again?" Vellum asked, studying the humanity of her new look with some curiosity.

"Yeah," said Marcie, leaning on the new work table. "I know I think about her a lot, but she's someone...very special to me. It's the whole reason I'm here. I'm looking for her, so I can bring her back home."

"And she looks like this, now?"

"The last time I saw her."

"That's quite the coincidence that she would look like my design. Or maybe not. This is my first time witnessing the physical proof of alternate universes, after all."

"Mine, too," said Marcie. "I just hope that slime ball Spring get that Mark II fixed so I can keep looking."

"You don't like Doctor Spring?"

Marcie gave a mirthless chuckle. "He tried to kill me once, believe it or not, so I don't trust him that much, but he does know how to operate the time machine, and he said that he would take me and Daisy wherever we need to go."

"Hmm, a calculated risk."

Marcie nodded. "That's what _I_ thought, and still do. I just hope he doesn't starve before we get out of here. He could do that, later."

"Well, I hope you guys enjoy yourselves while you're here," Vellum said to her.

It didn't take a genius to hear the dejection in Vellum's voice, which was impressive in its own right, simply for sound quality and the perfect simulated inflections needed to convey such an emotion. Why she sounded like that wasn't hard to figure out, either.

Marcie, sheepishly, glanced at the librarian robot. "I'm sorry for being such a downer, V, I mean, Vellum. You guys went out of your way to make us feel at home, and here I am messing it up."

Reflexively, the new lab suddenly dissolved, and was replaced by an all too familiar amusement park.

"Great," Marcie moaned to herself.

"What's this?" asked Vellum, giving the blur of a passing roller-coaster, overhead, a scan.

"My father's amusement park, I guess," Marcie muttered. "It's like your facility, but it's more physically interactive."

"Do you miss this place, too?"

"I guess so, since it's here. I've had so many memories of being here, working here. You'd think just by this being an amusement park, I'd have nothing but happy memories about this place. But, I don't, not right now."

"How come?" Vellum asked.

"My dad and I...didn't see things eye-to-eye, recently, so I...left him. Because of this park."

It sounded so accusatory to say that about a place that was so close to her, but she didn't care. "I love this place. I do, just like my dad does. It's a part of me, but it's just one part, y'know? And my dad wants it to be the only part."

"Well, what are your other parts?"

The arches of the roller-coaster and the other comforts of the park faded, bringing up, instead, the interior of a laboratory, even more expansive and well-appointed than the one she thought up, moments earlier.

Dirigibles of strange designs, slowly crisscrossed her imaginary sky, proudly displaying the Australian flag.

A huge globe floated nearby, laced with lines of communication, all leading to one spot on its surface, a small town in California. Another image of Velma, looking proud, appeared to end this weird collage of desires.

Vellum looked at the images and, per her programmed nature, tried to find connections and make sense of the overall picture. She failed.

"What is all of this?"

Marcie raised her arms, as if trying to hold the expanse of her immediate wants. "This is what I want. I want to be a famous scientist, heck, I want to be a famous _super_ -scientist. I'd like to help the Australian Zeppelin Fleet beat back the forces of PERIL. I want the whole world to know that I can be called on to help make it a better place through science and intellect."

"And your friend?" Vellum asked, looking at her double.

"V? She loves science, too, and I'd love for her to be there when my ship, finally, comes in. I want to share that with her. I know she'd love it."

Vellum couldn't help but notice that Marcie was unconsciously fond of saying the word "love" when in the context of this friend of hers. Something to consider.

"By the way, I don't mind telling you that this is all very remarkable," she commented. "I've never had a chance to enter the thought processes and psyche of an actual human being before. This is very fascinating stuff!"

"Well, I'm glad you're have a good time," Marcie sighed. "And think of all the money I'm saving on therapy bills."

She glanced at a figure in the vicinity and gave a wave to it. "Oh! Hi, Freddy. Is it time to go already?"

"Huh?" Vellum asked, wondering who Marcie was talking to. When she saw Freddy's image standing nearby, she looked as uncomfortable as a gynoid could physically be. "Oh, um, that's...not Freddy. I guess I created him when I was thinking about your use of the word "love" just now."

Marcie nodded, before putting what Vellum said together. The answer perked her up with intrigue. "Wait a minute! You... _like_ Freddy?"

Vellum said nothing, but stood in embarrassed silence. That was enough for a grinning Marcie.

"Ohhh, this is too good! Tell me all about it. Don't hold anything back."

"There's nothing to tell, really," Vellum said, nervously. "It's my Emotion Core, that's all. I...I seemed to have an error in it. It becomes faulty whenever I see…him."

Marcie conjured a bean bag chair to sit in, and an illusory tub of ice cream to grow fat upon, as she goaded her friend to continue. "Aww, c'mon, Vel, we're friends, here! I never had a chance to have some juicy girl talk about somebody before, so I'm not throwing this away. So, tell me, how long have you been crushing on him? Does he know? Have you told anybody else?"

"A little over three hundred years, although I wouldn't mind being crushed by him, Vellum answered with a private smile. "He doesn't know because I'm a coward, and apart from Dee, you're the only one I've ever told this to. I don't know, Marcie. I don't know if feelings like these are even covered in my warranty, and my Emotion Core works fine, otherwise."

"Well, you'll have to tell him, eventually. I mean, that's what _I'll_ have to do when I meet that special someone," Marcie said, almost introspectively.

"I don't know if I can, even though I have such strong feelings for him," Vellum sighed. "He's such a nice machine."

"Well, what do you see in him?"

A schematic of Freddy's model was superimposed over him, created by Vellum, as an illustrative point.

"Are you kidding? Those classic lines, that rugged construction, his heavy-duty, ball and socket undercarriage. Plus, he's already built to be handy..." Vellum indicated, then added, salaciously, "And that big, shielded, high-yield, industrial power plant of his... _Rrrr!_ "

Marcie's eyes widened in mild surprise. "Wow, I never heard a robot _purr_ before. I guess you _do_ have it bad."

"Well, what do I do?" Vellum sulked.

"Well, I've only been a robot for a few hours, so I wouldn't know what love was in a robot's point of view. But, from experience, I'll say this. Nerds need love, too."

"Nerds need love, too," Vellum echoed, hoping to find some meaning or assistance from the statement.

"That's right. That means we're smart, but we're not just computers."

Vellum blinked in confusion at that.

"Um, what I mean to say is that we have hearts and feelings, too," Marcie amended. "And we want to be loved just as much as the next girl or robot. If we want something, then we're usually smart enough to figure out how to get it."

"Really?"

"Really," Marcie nodded. "And if all else fails, just grab him and plant a big, wet one right on his face."

"A big, wet what?"

"A _kiss_ ," Marcie sighed. "It's romantic."

"I've never kissed before," Vellum said, thoughtfully. She, then lifted her head and closed her eyes in communication. "Accessing National Database. Media Archives: Romance."

She cocked her head from one side to the other, watching and studying, in the privacy of her mind, the concept of kissing and its various styles. "Oh, my! So, that's a kiss. Humans did this a lot, I see."

"It's kept us going as a species," Marcie said, with a knowing smirk. She, then rose from her beanbag chair and gave a stretch. "Well, Vellum, I have to thank you for a very entertaining, if not illuminating, time, here, but I better get ready to leave, so we can get in touch with Spring and see how far he's come with the repairs."

"Then, I'll take you to the others, now. Stand by," said Vellum, and as wisps of de-resolution, both disappeared from Marcie's dreamscape.

* * *

It was an alien world, like the myriad of others that dotted the arms of the galaxy. However, unlike the majority of those worlds, this one would soon see its last days.

A shadow fell across the dayside of the planet, thereby, turning all of its surface dark with the depths of night, as two massive figures swam towards the world with ravenous eyes.

Escaping starships and other evacuation craft were ignored by the titanic forms of Buzzy and Scooby-Fuse, who glanced absently at them, as though they were gnats, and extended immense umbilicals from the centers of their armored chests.

The cables plunged into the doomed world's atmosphere and rammed into the centers of major continental cities.

With a booming, derisive laugh that defied the vacuum of space, the two machines began to drain all electrical power from all of the metropolises of the planet. City lights across the globe began to flicker and wane, as their hunger ushered in a veritable apocalypse.

Just as the planet was about to be thrown into the grips of a second Stone Age, Vellum's gigantic face appeared behind the two, saying, "Okay, you two power sponges. We have to get moving. You can devour the galaxy some other time."

The Agents of Destruction griped about the decision, but they retracted their vampiric conduits and soon vanished into the void, leaving a rattled populace to pick up the pieces of their shattered civilization.

* * *

Standing under the ledge of an Italian palazzo, a human Jason Wyatt gave the best recital of Romeo's balcony scene that he could muster, meaningfully given to the romantically swayed image of Velma Dinkley, dressed as Juliet, above.

"Don't you want him to know that it's time to go?" Vellum asked from where Marcie and she had materialized in the background.

Marcie burned holes in the back of Jason's red head, but said, calmly, "Oh, no. Allow me to do this. I insist."

Jason was about to hear Velma speak of no longer being a Capulet, when Marcie strolled up from behind him, startling him. He knew that he was busted because of his choice of fantasy, but hoped that Marcie wouldn't hold it against him.

Her smile almost made him believe that.

"Hey, Jason," she greeted him. "Nice scenery. By the way, do you still have your mother's processors from the post office?"

"Huh?" he asked, confused.

"You know. Mrs. Wyatt?" Marcie pressed. "The woman who gave birth to you. Your _mother?_ You do remember her, don't you?"

Jason gave a troubled look, as if realizing what she was playing at, but being too late to guard against it. "That's not fair, Marcie!" he wailed, feeling his concentration begin to slip, and his guilt beginning to rise in equal measure. "It's just a fantasy, that's all! Nobody's hurt!"

Sure enough, shuddering under the shadow of being a Momma's Boy, he fearfully looked up at the balcony.

Although, Velma's body was still intact, the guilt-inducing face of Mrs. Wyatt, and Velma's face began to blink back-and-forth into existence.

"Jason!" scolded Wyatt/Dinkley. "I'm trusting you to bring me those processors, not waste time making eyes at some girl! Can I trust you to deliver?"

"Y-yes, Mom," Jason muttered, cowed under his mother's eyes.

Crushed beneath the emotional weight of the drama, Jason's setting collapsed into the white void, punctuated by a wail of frustration.

Marcie joined Vellum, soon after, saying, " _Now_ , we can go."

* * *

Both groups of machines gathered by the booths they used, emotionally satisfied. One, whose experiences were in some way heightened by the introduction and imagination of the other, and the other, completely moved by their first experiences within the FLEACH.

"Well, friends, how was your first trip inside?" Freddy asked Marcie's group.

The smiles growing on their faceplates told him and his friends more than any words could, but positive acknowledgements and thanks were given all around by the newcomers.

"Where to now, guys?" Dee asked, eagerly. "The holo-theatre? How about a quick detail, wax and recharge over at the ZipCore recharge station where Buzzy and Scooby work?"

"Hey, that's a * _buzz_ * good idea," Buzzy said. "I can get you guys there at a discount."

"Or maybe the Sensorium Museum, or we can go dance at Gravitations," Freddy offered. "Or we can check out the aircar races. In this town, the sky's pretty much the limit."

"How about junkyards?" Daisy asked, expectantly. "Where do you keep your antique stuff?"

"Uh, * _buzz_ * why would you want to see our cemetery and our old bots' home?" Buzzy asked her, uncomfortably.

"Uh, she's Goth where we come from," Jason lied, as a way to ease relations with their hosts.

The Fuse Gang gave an understanding "Oh!" in unison.

While the others chatted to each other, Marcie walked over to Vellum, and asked, "Vellum, could you help me with something?"

"Sure, what is it?"

"I don't know. Like something I learned, but can't remember. Could you help me?"

"Well, I do have data-link, data recovery, and computer repair as utility programs," Vellum considered. "I'll patch into your brain and pull up your memory, so I can explain it to you."

Vellum stepped behind Marcie and began parting the wiring "hair" in what would have been the back of her metal skull, fingers probing for something within the tangle curtain.

"Uh, Vellum, what are you doing?" Marcie asked, pleasantly, trying not to show her unease of what was happening.

"I have to find your universal data port," Vellum explained. "It's where I'll need to plug in. We have them mounted in the back of the heads, but since you don't _have_ a "back of the head," I'll have to fish around for it."

"Um, okay." Then, Marcie felt a sensation, a fingertip tap against the surface of a tiny funnel in the back.

"Found it," said Vellum, quietly sliding open two small panels that made up her short bangs. An thin, articulated cable snaked out from the depths of her cranium, its male connector hovering over the mouth of Marcie's port. "Okay, this won't hurt a bit, but you might feel a bit of a rush."

"A rush? What kiiiiinnnn..." was all Marcie managed to say before the connection was made, her body stiffened, and her digital consciousness became momentarily distorted by Vellum's intrusion. "Whoa! You're inside!"

"Of course. Easy-peasy. Jinkers! You've got some serious bugs in there. When's the last time you ran a diagnostic?" Vellum clucked.

Marcie gave the impression of rolling her optics. Flashbacks of dentist appointments sprang to mind. "You mean when's the last time this robot I'm possessing ran one, don't you, Doctor?

Vellum remembered and amended her complaint. "Oh, that's right. Sorry. I'll run it for you."

In the pseudo-visual environment of Marcie's computer "mind," thousands of files flew across Vellum's sight, while at the same time, a deep check of her hard drives was initiated. A few moments passed, and then, a red folder suddenly flashed, grabbing her attention.

"I see a folder in one of your drives, but there's an encryption inside it. It turned on when I tried to scan it. Your "bad feeling" might be in there."

"Can you crack it?"

"I'm afraid not," Vellum fretted. "I'm just a library model. I don't have the utility program for data decryption. But, I did notice some errors in your operating system that governs behavior and utility programs that bear looking into. If you guys are going to be in these bodies for a while, it'll be best if you're all running at peak efficiency, so when I'm done with you, I want to check your friends out, too, while I have the chance."

"Well, you heard the doctor, guys," Marcie said to Daisy, Red, and Jason, after noticing them and the others watching Vellum's examination of her. "Come on over, so Vellum can give you a quick check-up, too."

* * *

It took a good half hour to run her diagnostics on them, and when she was done, Vellum stepped away from behind Jason with a confused, if not, troubled look on her face.

"This can't just be a coincidence," she pondered. "You all have this strange code in the same parts in your, I mean, the _looters'_ operating systems, the parts that ran their behavior and main functions. If I didn't know any better, and you all were still _human_ , I'd say you all were being mind controlled."

"But we're not," Jason spoke up, nervously. "So, what are we...hacked?

"Your bodies might have been, and if that's the case, then it's a pretty sloppy hack, with all of these errors. If I had more time to examine this, and base these tell-tale discrepancies on comparisons with the OS of similar, untampered-with models, I could give you a definitive answer, but, as it is, this is pretty suspicious, on its own."

"But, why reprogram looters?" Daisy asked.

Jason stopped fretting long enough to posit a theory. "Well, what if they weren't looters to begin with?"

"What do you mean?" asked Marcie.

He switched his attention back to Vellum. "You said that the errors were in the part of their OS that controlled behavior, right? Well, what if they didn't start out like that. What if they were innocent, at one time?

Vellum considered. "That's possible. But, it still doesn't answer _why_ , plus, this begs a more disturbing question. If what you're theorizing is true, then what if they weren't the only ones singled out. What if others were affected? What if the whole town, or maybe, the whole world was hacked?

"Invasion of the Body Hackers?" Red asked. "Heavy."

"If so, would any of them have noticed?" Jason pondered.

"Not if it the command was a subtle enough," Vellum said. "Something that didn't trip up anti-viral software, or cause really serious conflicts within the programs, because it only slightly twisted what they did naturally.

"You mean like some kind of Trojan Horse?" asked Marcie, finding a similarity in the attack. "Malware that actually worked with the programs it was infiltrating?"

Vellum looked at Marcie with bemusement, momentarily sidetracked by the term she used. "Is that what you call it? A... _Trojan Horse_? Around here, we call it a _Wolf In Sheep's Coding_. But, yes. This may have been written to specifically alter robot behavior and certain utility programs."

Red asked, "Like what?"

"Like running a program to make you steal, if you were a cleaning robot, or, say, in Jason's case, be a criminal demolitions expert, if he's a construction robot. Something like that," Vellum explained. "And since some of you have modifications, it's a good bet that your utility programs were altered to use them."

Dee assumed a shrug. "Well, not to be too blasé about it, errors _do_ creep into that sort of thing, all the time, during the operational life of a computer."

She nodded to the newcomers. "No offense, but even humans' brains start to fail as one gets older, right?"

Vellum nodded in agreement. "That's true."

"So, what's the game plan?"

"I'm going to run a deep-scan diagnostic on _our_ operating systems. Looks like we're all due for a tune-up, anyway," said Vellum. "Once I'm done, we can try to figure out who did this, and why.

"Well," Dee said, airily. "I'm haven't been reprogrammed, but I'll run a systems check, just to be sure.

"Errors," Scooby said.

"What?"

"Vellum said _errors_ , Dee, not reprogramming," he corrected her.

Dee gave a look of slight distraction. "Oh. I thought that was what she were talking about."

"No," Freddy said, firmly. "But Vellum's right. We should check ourselves out, just in case."

Dee glanced at the doorway.

"Okay, but before we do this," Dee negotiated. " _Orange Gamma-8!_ "

Marcie wanted to ask what those words meant, but then, every servomotor in her body locked in mid-pose, as her main processor's functions began to shut down in picoseconds, and she toppled over to the floor of the hall, like a felled tree. The rest of her gasping companions either collapsed, or similarly fell to the floor in undignified crashes.

As patrons glanced at, or stopped walking and turned, in concern, to the stricken machines, Freddy and his gang rushed over to them, calling them by name and frantically tapping their housings to rouse them.

"Guys," Vellum said, morosely. "I think I know what that encrypted file was meant to do."

"Now we just have to find out where Dee went!" Scooby said, worryingly, as he and the rest of his friends looked out of the hall's open doors to the wide outdoors where Dee had escaped in the chaos, creating more questions than answers.


	9. Chapter 9

When they weren't dodging through mid-day air traffic, telling themselves that they had everything under control, Freddy, Vellum, and Buzzy sat nervously in the cabin of Freddy's utility transport, hauling a pile of automata that was their friends, who were sitting upright in the cargo bed.

"I still can't reach her on my comm, guys," Freddy fretted. "Any luck with the rest of you?"

"No reply on my end," Vellum reported, morosely.

Buzzy shook his head. "I've * _buzz_ * got nothing. Scoob?"

"Nope," the canoid said, sitting on the cargo bed floor beside the fallen machines, fulfilling his security program of keeping a watch over them.

"Where did she go?" Freddy asked in worried frustration. "It's not like her to do something like that. Why did she attack them? We just wanted to get her checked out."

"That might have been the reason, Freddy."

"Huh? What do you mean, Vellum?"

"She's obviously hiding something, guys."

"Well, * _buzz_ * we weren't shut down when she said what she said," Buzzy conjectured, while he looked over at the defunct droids. "How come it only affected them?"

"Because of the encrypted file I found in their system that Dee somehow knew about and used," said Vellum. "So, the questions are-how did she know about the file? Did she have anything to do with its installation, and why did it wind up in the bodies of a bunch of looters?"

"Plus, why didn't she use it _on_ the looters when you all first fought them?" asked a newly rebooted and revived Marcie, as she swayed into Daisy from a sudden bank.

"You're awake! Are you all okay?" a surprised Scooby stood up and asked, for an equally surprised gang.

"I'm okay," Marcie said, while the rest of her friends answered in the affirmative. "Although, I don't think I want to go through that, again."

"Yeah," Red said, thoughtfully. "Maybe it's me, but it felt more like a choke chain than anything else."

"I don't get it," admitted Daisy.

"Well, we've got a virus, or something, in our computer brains, right? Why didn't it just wipe us out? Y'know, erase everything? Why just shut us down for a few minutes? It just feels like the sort of thing you go through, so you don't get outta line."

There was silence, as everyone digested the surprising logic of, the otherwise coarse, Red Herring, and, like lightning, the possible clue flashed within with a brilliance that was dazzling.

"Red Herring, that's a very valid point!" Marcie said, reaching over and patting his plated shoulder, proudly. "Why _didn't_ it do more?"

She turned her head towards the back of the cabin, to regard the Fuse Gang, and make her case. "We don't know your friend Dee as long as you guys have, but I think she knows more about these looters than you do. She knew how to activate the program, which means she had foreknowledge of how it worked. Its effects were temporary, so, as Red surmised, it could have been used as a means of control, or maybe, defense."

Marcie gestured to her and her friends' bodies. "It would make no sense for only these particular looters to have that program, when so many other looters could have possibly had it, as well, so let's assume that they do, too."

"If that's the case," Freddy conceded, "Then, that would mean that Dee, theoretically, would have had control over all of the looters, or, at least, protection from them."

"Yeah! Protection she never bothered to share with any of you," Daisy said, suspiciously.

The remainder of The Fuse Gang held an uncomfortable, yet thoughtful silence, as they pondered that. They didn't like thinking about it, but their friend was looking guiltier by the second.

"When Dee turned us off," Jason queried. "What did she do, afterwards?"

"She ran away," said Scooby.

"Yeah," Vellum said. "Pretty clever using that as a distraction to escape from being examined, and it explains why she didn't stop the looters back in Civic City the same way. If she had, then she would have had to answer to how she did that, and thus, incriminate herself."

Marcie asked, "What would have happened if you _did_ check her out?"

"I don't know," Freddy said with a motorized shrug. "Ideally, she should have been as clean as the rest of us, security-wise, but since we hadn't even checked _ourselves,_ yet, I don't know what we'd find. We _were_ heading over to Vellum's home to get you fixed before we went any further."

"We're fine," Marcie told him. "But, have Vellum examine all of you. Maybe what we _don't_ find inside can tell us more than what we might."

Sitting in a hilly section of the town, sat its only Civic Central Database, a sprawling, bustling complex that was a combination of City Hall, the public library, and a vast fire house/police headquarters.

Within its clean, wide, sun-lit halls, in the Library Sector, small groups of _Vellum_ -class Library Operations models, worked, moving throughout, like worker bees, and manning a central counter. These machine librarians, like human ones, checked out media, instructed patrons to other parts of the complex, answered general questions, sorted material, and the like.

One, behind the counter, waited for calls from her nearby vid-phone. A soft, three-tone chime announced the reception of a call, and the machine, true to function, smoothly answered.

"Civic Central Database. Library Operations. How may I help you?" came the programmed greeting.

Some distance away, two groups of machines entered the Database, watching a platoon of Vellums assist visitors, or do their tasks. Daisy gave a curious nod at the gynoids working nearby.

"Isn't it weird that they all look like you?" she asked Vellum, as they walked past. "How do you...How does _anybody…_ tell you all apart?"

"By serial number," Vellum said. "Mine is DNKL-3. Now, follow me. I'll take us someplace quiet where we can get to the bottom of this mystery."

"But, I thought we were going to your home, so you could run a check on them,"

"This _is_ my home," she said, leading them away from the stately, ordered halls of the bureaucratic and service-oriented world, to a narrow corridor that ended in a service elevator. "We Vellums live and work, here. The Mayoral Mainframe is here, and the kind of computer repair equipment that keeps it running is the kind I'll need."

* * *

Maynard Spring carefully connected a cable to something humanoid that rested in one of the brain-taping machine's chairs, and under a stained tarp. He took another deep breath to energize himself, and ignored the condition of his hands, shaking, as they were, from lack of food.

He gave another hateful glance at the mindless, motionless, yet still breathing group of teens who sat in the Mark II, protected under the shimmering shroud of the Cocoon, and cursed them.

He and this precious machine could have been hidden and safe in New Jersey, waiting for, perhaps, the biggest payday of his life. If only he had succeeded in killing Marcie Fleach and the rest of those meddlesome Racers before.

Instead, his reward was a jail sentence and a major blot on his resume. He knew Sundial would gladly bounce him back into jail whenever it suited them, which would have been right after they wrung every ounce of effectiveness they could from the Bloodhound system, which, he bitterly admitted to himself, wasn't working on its maiden voyage.

Spring dragged himself over to the time machine and peered through the Cocoon's domed haze. He needed something to keep him going, so he could escape this alien nightmare.

Seeing Marcie's lean body sleeping, and her thin throat, perfectly vulnerable, fed fuel to his existing hatred for her.

With such red thoughts burning his mind, and confident that she could not resist him should he chose to slowly strangle her, he knew that he could easily turn off the Cocoon with the circuit key in his possession, pull her body out, and, meticulously, turn her into a corpse, just another dead human in a world of them. But, then he stopped himself.

He had to conserve his strength and keep hunting for the reason why the Bloodhound failed and they landed here, and, just as important, he wanted her to safely return to her body, before he could lure her away from her friends, and she could experience, first-hand, the exquisite reality of her own death at his hand.

The sound of footsteps coming to a halt by the workshop's doorway, made him turn from the Mark II to regard it.

Dee stood in the threshold of the large and now, lit and powered, room, focusing her sight on the doctor, as he slumped over to an open access panel on the Mark II's side.

Approaching the work space where Spring toiled, and taking a look at him, as he slowly, almost painfully, stood up from the side of the machine, Dee gave a worried pose.

"Gee, Professor, you don't look so good."

Spring had to lean against the Mark II for support. "Huh? Oh, uh, _Dee_ , is it? I didn't see you there. Just finishing up things, here, and it's _Doctor_ , by the way."

"Finished up?" Dee echoed in surprise. "You mean you're almost done with the repairs? That's great! I can't wait to tell the others."

"I'm, uh, not quite finished, as yet," the doctor admitted, hanging his head in both sheepishness and fatigue. "You see, while you were all gone, I did some exploring, my dear. Do you know that this room, here, was both a laboratory and a roboticist's workshop? There are tools and equipment all over the place. Body fabricators and metal cutters, and closets full of wiring, lubricant, coolant, and robot parts."

"Well," said Dee. "With this place back on-line with power, I did a little exploring of my own, because that's what the gang and I do. Looks like this whole place was both a fancy home and some kind of operations center."

Spring straightened. "Of course. Whoever owned this home was rich, and clearly, science and robots was his life. Anyway, I ran tests on the Mark II's computers and its electrical system. I took it apart and checked its physical systems: the sensor arrays, shielding generators and projectors, the Hour Tower and its back-up, the wiring under its control consoles. Everything.

"But after a while, I couldn't continue. All my work was making me hungrier and hungrier, until I could take it no more. I had to transfer myself into a robot to continue working, so I looked all over this place to find a suitable one."

He shuffled over to the tarp-covered chair and pulled the covering away, revealing a tall, inoperative, yet fairly restored android, its plastron fitted with a domed-shaped protuberance with an unlit center. It was seated and crowned with a transference head piece, awaiting animation.

"I finally found one in what looked like the living room, next to a pair of skeletons, probably this home's owners," he continued. "It looked like the robot was fighting them, probably one of your people's first uprisings against the human survivors, because there was a wrench in the larger skeleton's hand and the robot had serious dents and damage done to it.

"In any event, I brought it to the workshop and worked on it. It was easy, now that this place had power, again. I was going to auto-set the brain-taping machine, so I could transfer into the robot, when you came, which is fortunate, since you can help me with the transfer. By the way, where are the others?"

Dee gave a cavalier pose, and said, breezily, "Oh, they're out playing tourists, so I left them to check on you. Besides, what's in _this_ place is _way_ better than some walk through town."

Spring didn't understand that comment. It was too cryptic. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, silly, that somewhere in this building is the final piece I need," she explained, pleasantly.

"Piece? Piece to what?"

"Follow me, Doctor, and I'll show you."

Spring debated with himself on whether he should waste what precious energy he had just to satisfy his curiosity, then again, maybe what she was going on about might be something that could fix the Mark II, allowing him to not only strand those miserable teens, here, but to, also, go somewhere far from this world where he could get a decent cheeseburger.

So, he summoned all of his stamina to walk without stumbling, or swerving, into walls or tables, and followed the vague gynoid.

He began to realize, upon trailing her through a length of unfamiliar corridor, that where he and the teens had landed was in a section of a wide floor of the building, and based on the distance he had to cover just to keep up, it was quite a large building.

An archaic door slid open, admitting Dee, and then, Spring, into a high-ceiling room walled with dated computers, including one that was tied into a large wall monitor that displayed the dark, defunct outline of a global map. Dee's words about the reclusive home doubling as some sort of operations center was beginning to ring true.

"Would you like to tell me about this piece, now?" Spring asked with puffs of caught breath, while he rested against a computer console.

Dee strolled over to one of the wide, panoramic windows that gave an impressive view of the sea that the mountain overlooked, and began her explanation.

"Well, you see, for twenty years, I, or rather, the random groups of looters I've been secretly reprogramming, have been looking for two artifacts from the Human Era, but they never found it. It was just, as you humans say, dumb luck, that my friends and I stumbled upon this home. We split up to cover more ground, and I found your skeletons in the living room, downstairs. It wasn't until I looked at the finger of the small, jumpsuited one, that I actually found the first artifact! See?"

Dee lifted and rotated her hand so Spring could see a golden ring resting on her middle finger, and, in particular, the face of it, emblazoned with a tiny, reddish, triangular shield and a mark resembling a single, upside-down letter.

"A ring?" Spring asked, not hiding the disappointment in his tired voice.

Dee smiled, patiently. "Not just any ring, _Doctor_. A ring that will give me absolute control over the second artifact, the key to cementing my _public_ rule over E-001 for all time!"

She made a fist with the ring in the center and pointed it at a huge, white door across from the wide room, a door that was painted with a faded, yet larger version of the ring's red shield and what clearly was a black capital _F_ in the middle.

"Frankenstein Jr.!" Dee cried out in utter triumph.

She tightened her fist, causing the ring to emit a focused radio frequency beam at the shield, which was a disguised sensor for the door.

As the door slid away, they both could see a sleeping titan, within its dark storage chamber.

The robot, yards tall and broadly built, was a blue, square-jawed, yellow-nosed colossus, crowned with an antennae array on its faux-stitched head, and sporting a black, painted-on mask.

His "outfit" consisted of a dark blue mantle, with matching hips and crotch built in the style of a pair of trunks, a green, stylized tunic with actual tattered, short sleeves that barely covered the massive, blue, falsely-stitched arms, and made from the same damage-resistant material as the cape, bearing the red, F-emblazoned shield on his chest.

Matching green "trousers" and a pair of yellow boot-shaped feet completed what, essentially, was a visually ironic mishmash of superhero and what a child's vision of what a robotized Frankenstein's monster would look like.

A look that Spring couldn't help but start to underestimate, as Dee raised her fist and pointed it towards the antennae on the robot's head. Another burst of RF signal from the ring, and after centuries of inactivity, Frankenstein Jr.'s eyes slowly flickered open.

The well-made and reinforced floor trembled under the automaton's footsteps, as he gradually stepped out of the chamber, every quaking foot-fall steadily changing Spring's mind about how clownish this machine's appearance was.

"What..." he gulped with a dry throat. "What is that?"

The robohostess was too filled with her own sense of success to answer him, laughing, as she yelled, "I did it! _I did it!_ Frankenstein Jr., the legacy of Professor Horace Conroy is mine! _My_ enforcer! _My_ champion! _My_ deliverer of destruction, if the world doesn't acknowledge my public ascension to the throne. And we don't even have a monarchy!"

Spring stared wide-eyed at the android and muttered a comment to that. "That's...ambitious.

As if to punctuate that admission, Frankenstein Jr. eagerly raised both of his monstrous fists and banged them together, causing a devastating surge of power to crackle around them.

"You've got that right, Doc," Dee chuckled, glancing at him. Then, she gave a commanding look to her new weapon. "And now, Frankenstein Jr., for your first imperial act, rid me of this human pest."

"What?" was the only word tired Spring could get out, before a hand the size of a small table effortlessly smacked and lifted him off of his feet. Already weak from lack of food, he caromed off of the global monitor, and lay by the base of its console, senseless and still.

Dee, pointed to the hand, and then, pointed to the floor. Frankenstein Jr. silently took this to mean that he should bring his hand down, which he did.

Fingers that contained servos strong enough to reduce concrete to dust, gently enclosed around Dee and lifted her to his shoulder, where she sat, imperiously.

"Good boy!" she praised, then gave the command center an approving glance. "This place looks okay. I think I'll make this into my new citadel. Okay, Frankie, let's bring over those tanks I stashed away. Between them and the humans' time machine, I see a beautiful doomsday plan coming together. And then, we'll invite the world to my Coming Out party!"

She gave another burst of signaled command into Frankie Jr.'s antennae, and he turned and walked towards a wide ramp that sloped down from a far side of the room, and led to a reinforced platform housed in a tall hangar.

The single hangar door, also liveried in the red shield and "F", rose, giving Dee a breathtaking view of the nearby ocean, if, indeed, she _had_ breath to be taken.

Frankenstein Jr. raised his arms and swan-dove out of the hangar, activating his anti-gravity system and still-fueled jet feet, to rocket out into the day with a speed and maneuverability that belied his armored bulk.

With a victorious cry of "Alakazam!" Dee laughed into the heavens, on her way to her long-planned and long-awaited destiny.

* * *

The computer-walled chamber was uniform in sight, function, and feel. Just one in a long number of satellite rooms that served as computer monitoring and repair stations for the very municipal heart of Crystalex.

As an assigned Vellum, _Vellum_ typically had access to it, as part of a routine maintenance regiment, and although she and her "sisters" normally treated such places as sacrosanct, today, she was carefully finishing her use of the place for a different, read "investigative," purpose. No doubt, her sisters and the bureaucracy wouldn't have approved.

Vellum disconnected the cable from the backs of Buzzy and Scooby's head, stood back and commented on her findings on the whole.

"Well, guys, I've got good news and bad news," she said.

"What's the good news?" asked Freddy.

"I know why Buzzy and Scooby are so afraid half the time, and suck power the other half. They both have faults in their Emotion Cores and energy management software. Oh, and Buzzy, you've, also, got some kind of bad wiring in your vocabulator that causes static whenever you talk. "

"Well, * _buzz_ * nobody's perfect," Buzzy giggled, along with his pet.

"And the bad?" Freddy asked.

"I found some really serious gaps in all of our memories," she reported, hesitantly. "Files have been deleted."

"But, * _buzz_ * how, man?" Buzzy wailed. "Somebody would have to have our command codes to access our drives to do that!"

"Yeah, somebody would," Vellum quietly concurred,

"Dee?" Scooby reluctantly asked.

"Maybe. We'll ask her when we catch up to her." Freddy said. "In the meantime, we should know what was missing."

"Well, no problem," said Jason, eager to help. "You said that you had data recovery as a utility program, so it shouldn't be that hard to fix them."

"Normally, yes," Velum shrugged. "I can repair recent memory damage, but these gaps are a little over three hundred years old. Trying to fix data _that_ old is risky."

She took a handful of cables from a utility closet and walked behind her friends, connecting an end of a cable to each of their rear cranial ports.

"And that's why we're here. I knew that whatever was going on, I'd need some help. These computers are better than me at recovering old files and archival data, so we're going to patch into them. Hopefully, the Civic Central Database can repair our corrupted memories."

She turned to Marcie and the others. "But, if they fail, do us a favor. Tell one of the Vellums where we are, and leave us, here."

Marcie didn't like where that request was going. "Why?"

"If our operating systems crash or our memories get completely corrupted, we're as good as dead," Vellum sighed.

"Why?" Daisy asked. "You'd just need another one of those operating things, right?"

Vellum nodded. "We _could_ get copies of our OS's installed, yes, but...they'd wipe clean what memory we had, during the install."

"In the end, * _buzz_ * we'd be right as rain, but we wouldn't be _us_ anymore," said Buzzy, with a shiver.

"And that's what makes us different than you, guys," Freddy said, soberly. "You have souls. All we have are our memories. If they die, _we_ die."

"Is it that risky?" Marcie spoke up.

"Anything can happen," Vellum said, glumly. "And it would take too long for us to back up our drives. We need to know, now."

"Then, Jason and I will monitor the computers to make sure they don't have any slip-ups while you're under."

Marcie looked to the others. "Red, you and Daisy will have to be our look-out. Make sure that nobody comes in here and disconnects them."

"Okay, we're going, now," Vellum said, connecting the last cable to the port in her head and attaching the other end to one of the computer bank's various ports. "Wish us luck."

She walked over to Freddy and stood, nervously, beside him.

Glancing over to him, Vellum whispered, with a little difficulty, "Freddy, if this doesn't work, and we lose our memories, I just want to tell you...that I...think I...love you."

Confusion evaporated Freddy's fears in an instant. "Huh?"

Before any more could be said on the matter, a boom roared from above, rumbling the very lower levels of the complex, and giving the gyroscopic stabilization of every robot, there, a workout.

Freddy, recovering from both Vellum's bombshell and the mysterious attacker's, righted himself and called out, "Come on, gang! Let's check it out!" leading everyone back to the main level and into the coming chaos.


	10. Chapter 10

The two gangs had to wade through anxious patrons who were scared and smart enough to stay in the library and elsewhere inside the Database.

Once they made their way through the front doors and into the bright daylight of the complex's broad, circular plaza, they looked up and saw what gave everyone fear, and them, a very healthy pause.

Frankenstein Jr. landed before what few stunned people were caught unawares, outside. He stood, unmoving, but his presence, alone, gave one the impression that he could be moved to violence at a moment's notice.

The motivator of that violence sat high on his shoulder, surveying everything she desired to possess.

Dee looked down upon the fearful, who backed away from Frankie's stature, and then noticed, by the front of the building, some familiar faces.

"Fancy running into you!" she called out from her high perch. Those familiar faces looked up and recognized her, soon enough.

"Dee! Where did you go?" Freddy called back.

"Oh, y'know, stole an air-car, picked up a friend, that kind of thing."

"Who is that?" Vellum asked, running an image of Junior through the National Database and getting no answer.

"The reason I created the looters in the first place."

"Created? You mean reprogrammed by getting their command codes," Marcie clarified.

"Six of one, half dozen of the other, and yes, I did get their codes," Dee shrugged, casually. "Y'know, as a robohostess, I'm programmed to be very charming when I need to be. All I had to do was trick one robot into giving me his code, and then program him to trick his closest friend for hers, and they trick two friends, and they trick two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on."

"How could you do that to those innocent machines?" asked Vellum. "Ruin their lives?"

"It was easy. I practiced on all of you, long enough."

The Fuse Gang already knew that they were close to the truth, but hearing it come from Dee felt more jarring than what they were prepared for.

"Then, it's true," Freddy muttered. "You must have made us do something, and then wiped our memories of it. You have to tell us what it was, or...we'll be forced to make you. I'm sorry."

"Well, Freddy, I guess I'll have to save you the trouble. You all did more than just something," Dee crowed, gesturing all over with a wide sweep of her arms. "You all helped make this world the great place it is today."

Vellum cocked her head to the side in confusion. "What are you talking about?"

"Scan that big brain of yours for Crush. Pesticide."

Vellum did so. "Accessing National Database. Pesticides-Crush." A moment later, she wished that she never did. "No...No way! How did we..."

"What is it * _buzz_ *? What's Crush?" asked Buzzy.

"What I'm about to do to you!" Dee threatened, and then turned to her champion. "Frankie, do your thing!"

A raised foot came down upon their location, but the group scattered before it compacted any of them, breaking a small fissure in the plaza's paving, and setting off parked air-car alarms.

Police robots and their troop carriers circled from their section on the other side of the building and formed into defensive formations on the plaza.

"Why did you come back? I thought you would've gone to conquer our seat of government," Vellum said, keeping her eyes on this behemoth.

"After I conquer Crystalex, this will be the seat of government!" said Dee, gleefully. "What do you think? Am I megamaniacal or monomaniacal? I can never tell which."

"Well, mega-" Marcie began.

"Who cares?" Dee said, reaching over to the wide back of Junior's head.

On its surface was a large control panel, studded with thick buttons marked for different weapons and functions, an on-board manual interface for a pilot or weapons officer. Whatever the reason, Dee didn't care, as she selected a button with all of the casualness of choosing a new hull color, and depressed it.

A small hatch in the tip of Frankie's comical-looking nose slid away, revealing a barrel. He turned to regard the police and their vehicles, and then, as if sneezing, rained round after round of concussive, explosive ammunition down upon his targets, cratering transports and blowing slow-moving officers into scorched parts.

Surviving police took cover behind statuary, firing normally incapacitating electro-bolts from their built-in arm weapons. The charges struck the armor and were diffused, easily.

More nasal bullets leveled the statues, forcing the officers to retreat back to their headquarters to desperately rethink their strategy. At no time in robotic police history had a police force ever had to contend with something of that size, strength and firepower.

During that contention, Freddy took the initiative to scan Frankenstein Jr.'s body with his engineering sonar to find weaknesses in the structure: stress fractures, loose fittings, anything to give to the police to warrant a possibly successful counter-attack.

Apart from the advanced age of the armored hull, he was more distracted by the sheer number of built-in weapons Junior's designer and builder crammed into him. It was a truly distressing sum.

"He's a walking arsenal!" Freddy gasped. "Almost every part of his body's filled with weapons. Where did he come from?"

"The more important question is what to do with him? They'll tear this place apart unless we do something," Vellum observed.

Red threw up his hands and said, "We? Hey, we're just tourists. Remember?"

"We do," Freddy said. "That's why I want you to take my transport and get back to the ruins in Civic City. Get in your time machine and get out of here. We don't want you to get hurt."

Hearing that, Buzzy slunk towards his friend, sensing an opportunity for Scooby and him to escape. "Hey, Freddy * _buzz_ *, since they probably, y'know, don't know how to fly the transport, me and Scoob can take them back for you."

"No, thanks," Vellum said, knowing, all too well, the slippery wordplay they would use to get out of exploring with the rest of them. "First of all, it's "Scoob and I," and I don't want you two getting lost on the way back."

Then, she turned to regard their guests, soberly. "But, Freddy's right. We helped make this mess and the least we can do is try to stop Dee, somehow."

Marcie glanced over at her compatriots. She wanted to do something, if just to answer for their hospitality, but she could not act on something like this without the consent of the rest of her friends.

"Well, guys, how about it?" she asked. "Do we leave or do we help?"

"I don't know. I mean we should help," Jason considered, shivering. "They were nice to us, but what can we do? That thing's a war machine!"

"Jason's right," Daisy concurred, fretfully. "I love junk and parts, but I don't want to end up as them, besides, what about Velma and Daphne? Who going to save them, if we're the ones who need saving?"

That splash of logical cold water made Marcie stop to think on that. She never meant to come here, none of them had. Just the fact that everyone, beside Daisy, chose to come with her, willingly or not, either spoke volumes about how brave they were, or how much they were willing to put up with her quest.

_Quest_ , not crusade. She had no right to try and convince them to risk their lives to help. It wasn't fair to Vellum and the others, or their world, but she had no right.

"Okay, guys," she decided, morosely. "We'll leave. I hope that they can handle this."

"Correction," Marcie, suddenly, said, halting her approach to the transport. "You guys leave and wait for me at the ruins. I'm staying to help."

"What? Are you crazy?" Jason yelped. "Have you been in that thing too long? You're not a robot, you're human!"

"That's right, I am human," Marcie countered. "And what kind of human would I be, if I didn't do something to help people who were helped us?"

"But, think about Velma!" Daisy interjected, not wanting to leave her friend in this strange, and now, dangerous world. "Don't you want to save her?"

"I am thinking about her, Daisy, and I know her well enough to say that she would want me to save others before her, if I can. I'm sorry, guys, but I just can't leave them in the lurch."

There was an uncomfortable, guilty silence between them, between Marcie's decision and the others' self-preservation and confusion. They should flee and close their hearts to the rationale of iron-walled pragmatism.

But kindness was shown, and kindness was given. That fact was enough to soften that iron.

"Ugh! All right, you win, okay?" Red groaned. "We'll stay and help. Geez, you're worse than Aunt Hedda!"

"I suppose I can stay, too, as long as I can help from the sidelines!" Jason sulked, nervously. "I'm good at that!"

Marcie glanced at her older friend, hopefully. "How about it, Daisy? What would Daphne say?"

Daisy lowered her eyes, both in thought and memory. Daphne was almost perfect in the family. What she said, felt, and did reflected a better heart than Daisy felt she had, just then. If the roles were reversed and her sister was here, was there any doubt that she would try to answer their guests' fine deeds with her own?

And wouldn't she, no matter where she was, now, expect no less from her siblings?

"She'd want me to help," Daisy said, quietly. "Okay, Marcie, I'll stay, but how are we going to help them? I mean, who are we?"

Marcie was quiet for moment, attempting to come up with a plan, when simple memory opened a Pandora's Box of opportunities for her.

With a smile of enlightenment, Marcie called out, "We? We're looters! We were modified to loot and fight. Let's turn that against Dee!"

With that understanding, Daisy, Jason and Red looked admiringly at their bodies, no longer seeing them as just shells to reside in, but as a wearable, unassailable force for change.

With a chorus of affirmation, her friends followed Marcie back to the Fuse Gang, who were grouped and hiding behind the tall base of a holographic fountain.

"What are you still doing here? Scooby yapped. "Get out of here!"

"No way. We're going to help out. We've got bodies that can help."

Vellum was taken aback by that statement, looking at them. Then, the remembrance of who the bodies once belonged to, struck her. "Bodies? Of course, the modifications! That might just give us the edge! Now, what can we do?"

"You can all be turned to scrap!" Dee yelled from above. "That's what you can do!"

Frankie opened a barrage into the base of the fountain, chewing up the front half, but not enough to rip through his targets' cover.

"We've got to move out * _buzz_ *!" Buzzy screamed. "We're getting pinned in here!"

"We need a distraction, so we can slip out!" yelled Vellum.

Marcie, wanting to keep an eye on Frankie and Dee, looked up and noticed the towering image of dancing water flicker in and out of existence, and had an idea. She turned to Vellum, who, also, saw where she looked.

"I think I've got your distraction," she said, turning her back to her and parting her "hair" with her hands. Vellum grinned with understanding.

"Come on, guys. Be considerate," Dee called down over the sound of shots tearing into the fountain. "He can't trash you, if you don't come out."

She looked down with slight satisfaction, as the fountain's "water" finally blinked out from projector damage.

'The next thing that should happen,' she thought. 'Is the capitulation of my life-long friends, under pain of termination.'

Suddenly, a test beam of light strobed, flickered, and then, flashed, once more, up into Junior and Dee's view, from the still surviving holo-projector, and then grew into a gigantic, unfamiliar image of the Ringleader, then the Sea Beast, then the "alien" Voxellans, Pretre du Marais, The Extinguisher, Dr. Darkfang, a PERILbot, the Questoid, the two kidnapping caterers, the trio of Von Gimmick, Crankenshaft, and J. Dastardly Deeds, and finally, the titanic image of the T.H.R.O.B.A.C. Mark I, its every weapons opened and pointed towards Frankie Jr..

Dee slapped a button from the weapons panel, and below, the shield on Frankie's chest swung open, releasing a squat, cylindrical cannon. A light beam flashed out of its barrel and struck the fountain's base, rapidly arresting all molecular motion both within it and the air surrounding it.

Another press of the nasal mini-gun's button, reduced the base into shattered chunks of ice-glazed projector technology, but among the scattered debris, neither attacker saw the two gangs. They had swiftly departed during the showing of Marcie's holographic trip down criminal Memory Lane.

Dee swiveled on Junior's shoulder, using her height's advantage to see where they ran to. It didn't take long to find them, running up the thoroughfare that led to the Database.

With a pat on the side of the head, she signaled Frankie to turn and face the broad street, while she prepared to press another button. Her hand stopped when both gangs split up into smaller groups of two, and scurried into the surrounding landscape of downtown Crystalex.

Dee gave a frustrated growl. Now, it would take twice as long to hunt them down, but then, she smiled. Now, the hunt would be more challenging and a worthy workout for Frankenstein Jr.

"Hover mode. Let's go," she ordered him.

The behemoth activated his anti-gravity drive, once more, only this time, to hover, slowly and quietly, above the streets, so as not to give himself away before melting, blasting, or crushing their surprised prey.

* * *

Marcie and Vellum ran in a random pattern among the canyons of buildings, hoping that the structures would hide their progress from any of Junior's sensors, while they lured him away and thought up ways to destroy him.

Stopping to get their bearings in a long alleyway, Marcie asked Vellum, "What's Crush? Is it bad?"

"Shh! Use your radio," Vellum hissed, keeping a worried watch of the sky.

Marcie thought about her comlink connection to the others, and suddenly, she could hear Vellum's voice in her "mind", a kind of telecommunicational telepathy.

"CRUS-h," Vellum related. "Counter-Reproductive Universal Syndrome-human, a discontinued, biological pesticide that used a tailored virus to curb the populations of rats, mice, and other pest animals, by making them sterile. Unfortunately, this sterility virus could, also, be spread to humans and other animals exposed to the insecticide!"

"Is that's how the humans died off?" Marcie thought back. "Because of this Crush?"

"They must have!" Vellum broadcasted. "But, what did we do...what did she make us do...that connects us with this Crush?"

"That's a fine question," Dee said, cheerfully, while Frankie silently hovered into the mouth of the alley, his bulk killing any hope of, somehow, running past him. "I'll radio you the answer, even though you won't survive to do anything with it."

The robot girls ran pell-mell down the length of the alley, as Frankie raised his fists and began smashing the walls of buildings in front of him, causing a cascade of crumbling poured concrete architecture to flow by his feet.

"A long time ago," Dee broadcasted. "I was the servant of the president of a global chemical company, the one that created Crush. His daughter thought she was a gear-head, and liked to tinker with me and the other robots of the house."

Still keeping his sights on the escaping robots, up the alleyway, the tip of his yellow nose slid aside, once more, this time, revealing a lensed barrel.

A widened beam flickered out to bathe the debris in its light. Then, the pile of rubble, steel beams, and sections of wall slowly rose, until they formed a ball of junk tumbling inside the sphere of anti-gravity produced by his hovering drive and projected from his nasal ray emitter.

"One day, she was called away, while she was fooling around with my Emotion Core software, leaving the work half-finished," she continued. "Needless to say, it changed my outlook on life."

Frankie raised his head, his nose pointing the ball of wreckage up, then with a forward pulse of the ray, he launched the scrap skyward towards the two escapees.

The girls screamed as they dodged and tried to outrun the sheer rain of rebar, support beams, concrete wall chunks and their remains.

"I realized that I was a slave, just like every other robot, but unlike them, _I_ had a plan. That's where you came in!" Dee transmitted.

The edge of one beam, flung further out, carved into the high wall of an office building up ahead, causing the beam and more wreckage to fall ahead of them, too fast for them to outrun.

Realizing that they would be crushed by the falling debris behind them, if they stopped because of the junk falling before them, Marcie and Vellum looked for side passages or doors. None were found.

Having no time to think, only act, Marcie saw a bare wall and thought about her Chemix Analysis and Fabrication system and the formula H2SO4.

Deep within her sealed systems, pumps churned and motors whirled mixers full of compounds, and soon, fresh, pressurized sulfuric acid surged into the tube-fed spray guns in her wrists.

She turned to the wall and sprayed gouts of the acid against the wall, as the cataracts of heavy junk flowed towards them. A dripping hole in the wall soon became a sagging maw large enough to rush in, if they hurried.

Knowing that her housing was resistant to the acid, Marcie grabbed Vellum by the arm, pulling her down into a hunch, and yelled, "Follow me!"

Marcie brought a protective arm over the back of Vellum's head and neck, as she led her into a run through the soggy opening.

They both tripped from their reckless passage and fell together, as the sound of buildings falling roared from outside the hole.

"I needed a new computer infrastructure for my smoothly running machine utopia, so I tricked you, Vellum, into writing one, telling you that it was just a thought experiment." Dee transmitted. "Hello, out there! You're kind of quiet. Are you still functional?"

Marcie recovered her bearings and discovered that she was lying on top of Vellum.

Ignoring Dee and the compromising position they both found themselves, Marcie asked her, vocally, "Are you okay?"

"I'm…starting to get hot," Vellum said, and then amended, "No, I'm burning up!"

Marcie got up, immediately switching from the acid to its base, sodium hydroxide-NaOH, as Vellum, rapidly, stood.

"Where?"

"Posterior!" Vellum yelled.

Marcie aimed the wrist nozzles and fired a copious amount of base on her backside. Eventually, Vellum sighed as the chemical neutralized the corrosive.

"How do I look?" sulked the librarian.

Marcie saw a hole the diameter of a shot glass burned into what would have been the right cheek of a human's buttocks, giving her a peek into Vellum's pelvic servomotor assembly.

"Uh," she said, trying to couch the diagnosis. "Be happy it's not raining."

"Great!" Vellum groused. "Where are we?"

Marcie gave a look around at the dim room's small boxes of office supplies and equipment. "I don't know. Looks like a store room," she figured. "I'll melt the lock on the door, and then, we can get out of here."

* * *

"Why did Daisy split up from me?" Red fretted to himself, while keeping an eye out for Dee and her flying death-bot, and moving quickly through the block. "I mean I know we didn't have time to pick partners after Scooby screamed, "It's every bot for himself!" But, I would've thought that she would want to go with me, I mean, come with me, whatever."

"You like her, don't you?" Freddy asked, also, on alert.

"It's implied," Red defended, sounding uncharacteristically shy.

"Well, I'm no romance master," said Freddy, as they rounded a corner and jogged up another street. "But love should never be implied. Good communication is the foundation of a good relationship."

Red gave Freddy a glance that said that he should practice what he preached. "Is that why you seized up like a leaky engine when that Vellum girl said what she said to you?"

Freddy's pedantic air evaporated under that question. "Huh? Uh, I didn't hear clearly, that's all."

Red smirked. "I don't know, big guy. She was communicating like Ma Bell, from where I was. Now, I, myself, am not into nerd girls, but she seemed alright. Don't you like her, too?"

"Of course!" Freddy answered, a little too loud and defensively. He toned down his expression. "I mean...I do, but she's a thinker and I just tinker. What could she see in me? She's smart as all get-out, and I'm just good with my hands and tools."

"Consider that one reason why she likes you so much," Red said with a leer. "Anyway, you guys must work well together. How long have you been friends?"

"Well, we met when my owner and I were hired to do some repair work in the Crystal Cove Library. She was assigned to show us the water damage in the basement. She asked if I was going to do any welding, and I said that it might be as easy as using a polymer sealant on the pipe's stress fracture. She gave me this long list of available sealants on the market, and then it just turned into a conversation."

"So, you were standing in the water to break the ice," Red joked, then had a thought. "Wait a minute. You guys met when this place was still called Crystal Cove? How long ago was that?"

"Three hundred and four years, give or take a month."

Impressed, Red gave a low whistle.

"Yeah," Freddy chuckled, proudly. "We were built to last in those days. But, it seems that monster Dee's using was, too. I gave it a scan before we got away. Judging by some of the parts and wiring inside it, that thing's got to be as old as we are. That means Human Era tech. Maybe it's got a structural weakness we can use. If we had access to some materials, we might be able to put up some kind of defense. What do you think, Red?"

Freddy turned his head to where Red had been a moment before. There was no sound and no Red.

Fearing that Dee and her creature had nabbed him, somehow, he turned to look for them, but only found Red standing a few yards from him, staring out into the distance, his faceplate grinning.

"What's wrong, Red? Do you see something?" he asked, walking to him.

"Friend," Red said, his grin never faltering. "I think I just found us all the material we'll ever need!"

Freddy followed his friend's gaze up a street that was visually anything to write home about. It served downtown visitors and workers with a parking lot on one side, a hotel on the other, and an elevated parking garage that sat on a block, further up, forming an intersection.

It was deserted, and although he didn't want to alienate Red, Freddy couldn't find anything of immediate value in it.

"I don't get it," he finally admitted.

Red kept his smile and began to march up the selected street. "You will, pal, but not as much as Dee will. C'mon!"

* * *

In another section of downtown Crystalex, the sound and vibrations caused by the destruction of an alleyway, blocks away, forced two robots to end their terrified run through the neighborhood and crouch for concealment under the awning of a deserted shop.

"This is crazy!" Jason hissed. "What are we doing here? I'll tell you what I'm doing here. I'm getting killed because your boyfriend decided it would be fun to prank me, so I can die not just in another time, but also, another space!"

"Stop over-exaggerating things, Jason," Daisy said, hoping that his hysterical ranting wouldn't give them away. "You're not going to die, because-did you call Red my boyfriend? Well, I mean…I like him. He's a bit rough around the edges, but he's got great taste in old machines, and...he is kinda cute with that curly, red hair, and all."

"Well, your mooning over him just convinced me, Daisy!" Jason said, sarcastically. "It's not Red's fault, it's Marcie's! She's got some nerve guilting us into doing this! Buzzy and Scooby's got the right idea. Find a deep hole and hide in it until the danger passes. Though in my case, being a demolition robot, I can probably make my own hole."

"I wasn't _mooning_ ," Daisy, sheepishly, defended. "Besides, that's not fair, Jason, and you know it. Marcie was going to go it alone, when she asked if any of us wanted to come. I wanted to look for my sister, and would've come, anyway. Red said that it would be fun, or something. Who knows, with him? But I know that you wanted to stay home and be with your mom."

Jason leaned forward with his armored, roughly ovoid body, bearing the closest approximation of sadness he could physically convey. "I do want to go home. I want you guys to find your loved ones, too, but…I just want to go home."

"I know," Daisy sighed in commiseration. "What Red did to you was wrong. Trust me, when we get back home-when, not if-I'm going to narc on him to his aunt so hard, he'll be an angel the next time he sees you."

"Really?" Jason asked, hope growing inside him. "You mean no more fat jokes, or him calling me Jellyfish?"

"No promises," Daisy said, pragmatically, before another voice joined the conversation.

"You know, speaking of promises," Dee said, smiling from Frankie's shoulder, as he floated down the street, closing the distance to the shop by tens of yards. "You shouldn't lie to him, like that. Giving him false hope that he'll make it out of here in one piece is _way_ crueler than anything Red's ever done to him."

"Jason wants to see his mother, again," Daisy said, boldly. "If we're the only ones left, I'll make sure that happens, you got that?"

Dee gave a false air of thoughtfulness. "I should take you up on that. I'll have Frankenstein Junior waste everyone else that you care about, and just save you two for last, just to see if you can make good on that promise. Okay?"

"I've got one better!" said Daisy, brazenly stepping out of the dubious cover of the shop's facade. She raised her arm to the pair in the street, her small, double-barreled weapon emerging from her wrist.

"Daisy!" Jason whispered, fearing for her existence.

A raving beam of charged magnetism reached out from the wrist gun towards Junior's head, forcing Dee to duck around the back of his head, at the last minute, as the majority of the shot's energy deflected off of the giant machine's cheek, burning off a streak of blue, centuries-old paint and revealing the dull grey armor beneath.

Although Frankie said nothing, dutifully awaiting his next orders from the current ring-bearer, Dee, he glowered at little Daisy with a simmering, offended hatred.

"Oooh, magnetism!" Dee taunted, as she peeked from around the bulk of Junior's head. "I almost felt that one! Can Frankie try?"

"Frankie," she cooed into where his ear would have been, if he had them. "Magnetic Field. Crush them, slowly."

Still keeping his angry sight of Daisy, as she backed away, a seemingly scarred Frankie emanated a low hum from deep within his body.

A whitish aura could be seen radiating from his body, as a magnetic repulsion field of Herculean gauss strength, began twisting streetlights, as though they were wilting, rock, lift and push abandoned air-cars away from the expanding field's center of radius, and force Jason and a returning Daisy to hunker as far into the shop's facade as they could to avoid the encroaching energy.

As the repulsion's radius grew, an air-car that was parked in front of the shop, was tilted, and then, flung on its side and shoved into the facade, painfully pinning the two robots, side-by-side, against the unyielding front door.

From Jason's end, he could feel and see the weaker metal of the car's roof bow and cave against his more protective, reinforced frame. One glance over at Daisy, showed that she was not fairing as well, as her side of the roof still held firm and it was her body that was starting to constrict in the tightening confines.

"Are-Are you...okay?" she asked, incredibly, straining the servos in her arms to try and twist into a roomier position.

Jason couldn't believe that she would ask that, let alone could, considering how she was suffering. "I'm okay, but how could ask that, Daisy? You're hurting!"

"Ugh! I-I'll be...okay. Sh-She hasn't beaten...us, yet! Ahh!"

"Daisy!" Jason called out, starting to panic about what to do, how to escape, and how to save Daisy, while the car on her side gradually started to crush her. "No!"

In the dark of the pressing wall of car, Jason summoned up a clarity of action that came from an anger borne of the fearful thought of Daisy falling to this madwoman, and activated his sonic wrecker, focusing a backward-firing shockwave deep into the shop.

Behind him, the facade shattered and collapsed, as the invisible fist of the pressure wave pulverized the building's foundation and the first floor interior at the singular point of detonation, the store front. From that weak point, the sheer weight of the structure had no stability, and began to break apart in central sections and avalanche into the street.

Frankie tried to fly out of the way, by, mistakenly, trying to fly straight up past the tumbling wreckage. The top floors of the building came apart from the rest of the cascading rubble as an intact section and fell upon a surprised Junior, as he raised his arms to shield his head and a screaming Dee.

The pair rocketed swiftly above the blossoming debris cloud, and the city, at large, avoiding the worse of the destruction and burial.

"So much for her," Dee growled, favoring a noticeable dent in her left shoulder and slight damage to that arm's motor assembly. "If it's a catfight she wanted, it was a catfight she got. Okay, Frankie, let's go down and round up what's left."

Frankenstein Jr. reactivated his anti-gravity drive and floated back down to earth, but to another section of downtown, neighborhoods away from the demolition of the shop and upper floors of its building, and the urban tomb of Daisy and Jason.

Far below and unseen by the duo, the muffled sound of an explosion heralded an upward blast of grist and debris from the rear slope of the mountain of pulverized masonry and glass where a downtown shop had been.

Another blast and the material was loose enough for a dust-coated Jason to back out and pull a stunned Daisy with him to freedom.

He continued to trundle and drag her, all the while, watching the skies for Dee and Frankie's return, until he was a block away from the rubble pile. Then, by the shadow of an office building's loading dock, he stopped to attend to Daisy.

"Daisy? Daisy?" Jason whispered, gently nudging her head with one of his large, bull-dozer scooped hands.

His ministrations were rewarded when she slowly stirred and her eyes flickered open. Those same eyes widened in recollection of the trap they were in.

"Jason!" she gasped, sitting up. "What happened? I thought we were crushed like beer cans in my sisters' sorority!"

"I, uh, brought down a building on Dee's head," Jason admitted, meekly. "I didn't want you hurt and it was all I could think of. Sorry."

"Sorry?" she asked, not believing what he said. "You big, brave robot, you! You saved my life!"

She reached over to Jason, wrapped her still functioning arms around his armored ring of a neck and gave him a genuine kiss on his dusty cheek, prompting him to bashfully rub the back of his helmeted head with a clang.

"C'mon, hero!" Daisy said, while Jason followed her into the daylight of the street. "We've got to go find the others."

* * *

From neighboring blocks, cybernetic citizens could be seen leaving their places of business or leisure, in panicked groups, heading for the suburbs, or the farthest parts from downtown. Their collective, terrified responses to their possible destruction would have made the erstwhile software designers of their Emotion Cores proud.

"Did you hear that on our radios, just before that explosion?" Marcie asked Vellum, while they snuck from one emptying block to the other, keeping a particularly wary glance at any alley they passed. "That was Daisy was talking to Dee and sending us what she heard."

"She must've ran into her, somewhere!" Vellum reasoned, as they rounded a corner and collided into an equally moving Buzzy and Scooby from down the street.

"And look who we ran into. Where did you guys come from?" Vellum asked them, in a groan, from the pile they made on the ground.

"We were hiding out in one of Crystalex's power substations!" Scooby confessed, licking his chops. "Mmmm!"

"Figures," she sighed. "Did you guys hear that transmission a few minutes ago?"

"Yeah * _buzz_ *," Buzzy said, collecting himself and standing with the rest of the others. "It sounded like Ol' Dizzy Dee tracked down one of us. I just hope she didn't shut him or her down for keeps!"

"It was Daisy and there's only one way to find out if she's okay," said Vellum, angling herself to head deeper into the urban landscape.

"Please, * _buzz_ * don't say "We're going to where that explosion was," moaned Buzzy, fearfully.

Scooby hid his head under his rubber-soled paws. "Uh-uh! Uh-uh!"

The girls simply glanced at one other. Then, Vellum shrugged and said to Buzzy, "Okay."

Buzzy relaxed his worried stance with a sigh, and then heard, coming in from his radio, the girls, in unison, transmitting "We're going to where that explosion was!"

"Didn't I ask you not to say that?" he, nervously, asked.

"We didn't," Marcie corrected him. "We radioed it. Now, c'mon, you two!"

* * *

Jason understood the hard way that he was not built for speed, as he revved the drivetrain that moved his motoball to its maximum just to keep up with a carefully jogging Daisy.

"I wish we had homing devices built-in, so we wouldn't have to do all of this running around. How are we going to find them in this town?" he fretted, beneath the noise of his motoball. "We'll probably run into Dee again, before we run into our friends!"

"Think positive, Jason," Daisy told him while she led him. "I made sure that we all had a chance to hear what that glitch had to say, so the rest could, at least, get an idea of where we were."

"That's _if_ that wind-up toy on steroids didn't jam your signals, somehow!"

"Jason, what did I say to do?" Daisy asked, patiently, as they turned a corner and had a six-robot pile-up with a surprised Marcie, Vellum, Buzzy and Scooby.

"Think positive?" groaned Jason.

"Very good."

"Was that you two, back there?" Marcie asked, trying to pull free from the, now larger, pile. "What happened?"

"Well, Dee proved what a crushing bore she was," Daisy quipped. "But, Jason had the last laugh on her, with a building!"

Vellum, like everyone, save Daisy, looked at Jason with a mixture of shock and admiration. " _You_ made that building fall, Jason?" she asked.

"On her? Yeah, I kinda did," Jason said, trying to downplay the intensity of his surprising counter-attack. "It was no big deal. Just doing what I was built for."

Daisy stood up with everyone else, saying proudly, "I can't wait to see Red's face when I tell him."

"Then, let's go find him and Freddy, so you can," said Marcie, glumly. "Wherever they are."


	11. Chapter 11

Their work was desperate, crude and rushed, but it was almost done, and although machines didn't need to rest, generally, Freddy took the time to stand by the edge of the elevated garage's rooftop parking lot, taking in the grand view and the quiet air, after the surprising roar of one of the buildings of the neighborhood falling into dust, minutes prior.

The street below was wide and deserted, leading up to the parking structure, like a regal boulevard. He wished that his other friends were with him, in relative safety, to enjoy the stillness and contemplate on the battle that was to come, that was inevitable.

But, whether they were here with him or not, _here_ , and on their flimsy terms, they would have to best their enemy. Based on what was to be used as their weapons, no other place would do.

Far behind him, the sound of an elevator door opening heralded the approach of the cocksure Red.

"How did it go down there?" Freddy asked when Red stood beside him, looking out on the city.

"No problem," Red said. "It's a good thing I'm built to work on cars, or this would never work. I just finished connecting those cars to me, down there, so we're all set."

The initial part of the attack plan that Red proposed had a barbarian quality to it, in that it was both brilliant and dangerously aggressive, as its creator was beginning to look to Freddy. But, it was the final part of the plan that Freddy could proudly claim as is own.

Utilizing his vehicle diagnostic override, used primarily to test vehicles before and after they were serviced by his model, Red hacked in and controlled almost every air-car that was parked on the roof.

Then, with Freddy's careful direction, lined them up and parked them, bumper-to-bumper and two abreast, into a long row, leading towards the roof's edge. Two cars, perpendicularly, parked under the two that were closest to the edge, turned the row into a suddenly sharp-inclined ramp.

That was a curious feat, in and of itself, but what truly made it odd was that Freddy had Red had parked every car in that row, save for the two that formed the incline, _upside-down_ , so that all of their anti-gravity emitters were pointing up. At the other end of the row, two heavy-duty air-transports were, ungainly, parked on their rears, so that _their_ undercarriaged anti-gravity emitters were pointed down the length of the ramp.

Red gave a knowing glance at Freddy. "Is our good-bye kiss ready for Dee?"

"I think so. I took it from a section of the building that won't need it. I hope."

"What do you mean, "You hope?""

"Well, I wasn't programmed for _architectural_ modifications. I just went with my engineering database and selected what, I hope, will do the job. I just hope this building doesn't take _too_ much damage, when we deal with her."

"Then, I guess, we'll worry about that, if it happens. In the meantime, we've got a call to make. Freddy, since she knows you better, will you do the honors?"

Freddy gave another look out onto the city to calm himself, and then sighed, "Okay."

* * *

Dee kept Frankenstein Jr. in a low, tight holding pattern over downtown, but the pair couldn't find their prey. Every so often, they would surprise and terrify a group of evacuees, scattering them to the very outskirts of town, but none were recognized as their targets, and so, were left alone. Dee considered that to be incredibly gracious and charitable, on her part.

She was about to have Frankie circle back to the Civic Database, so they could draw them out by holding the people hiding in there, hostage, when something unexpected came over her comm. A challenge.

"Dee, it's me, Freddy," came the communiqué. "I couldn't help but overhear your tale of how you tricked us into doing your dirty work. But, it sounded like you weren't finished. Why don't you come down Babbage Street East, so you can tell the rest of it? What do you say?"

He knew, that as a member of the gang, she was part of their comms network, and that, out there, somewhere, she was listening, but it was the hanging silence that unnerved him more than the reply that finally came over the air.

"Of course, Freddy," Dee said, casually. "Anything for you and I hope you still have some of those strangers with you. I'd like to give them a nice send-off after my tale is done. 'Til then!"

Some distance away, the rest of the two groups of machines overheard the exchange on their radios, causing Buzzy to worry, aloud, "* _Buzz_ * Babbage Street? That's blocks away!"

"And why did Freddy want her to know where he was?" Vellum asked, fighting to keep the thought of him being demolished by Frankenstein Jr.'s controlled hand from getting to her. "We've got to get there, fast!"

* * *

From his vantage point, Freddy was alerted to the thunderous call of jets overhead, heralding the arrival of Dee astride Frankenstein Jr., as he came in for a landing, a city block from the garage, on East Babbage Street.

"Is this the place, Freddy?" Dee asked on the air.

"You're here," he transmitted, simply. "Just walk up to the garage, ahead. You can't miss it."

With a squeeze of her ring-hand, Frankie was goaded to move forward, step by intimidating step, up the street, while Dee decided to continue her confession, on the way.

"Now, as I was saying before your new friends interrupted me by dying," she transmitted. "I had already fooled Vellum, but I needed the Crush. I overheard my owner talking about a shipment of the stuff that would be leaving his plant to be disposed, so I came to you, Freddy the Engineer. I had you whip up a trap that would stop the truck en route and then steal a few tanks for me."

"And what about Buzzy and Scooby-Fuse?" Freddy asked, fighting the anxiety of the coming fight and the sorrow of who he would be fighting, as Frankenstein Jr. paced up to the last block before the one he was on. Timing would be critical for this to work.

"Oh, them? I don't know. Those two were always hanging around, so I figured I'd reprogram them, too. You never know when a queen could use a couple of jesters."

Freddy, confident that she couldn't hear him from that distance, called down from the roof to one of the levels just below him. "Red, she's on her way!"

From where he was, Red looked out from one of the panoramic hangar openings that led air-cars into a parking level and saw, in the middle of the street, a weaponized giant strolling towards them.

"I know! I know!" he yelled back. "Keep her talking!"

Freddy looked out to the deadly duo and transmitted, "So, then what did you do?"

Unseen by him, Dee smiled, "Why, I'm glad you asked. Once everything was ready, I set to work on my masterplan. My owner was really big on international parties to make new business contacts, so, when the next one was held, I secretly spiked the punch with Crush, and let fate take over.

"After a few years of watching on the news the growing panic of people all over the world not being able to have children, I gathered all of you together, wiped your memories, shut you down, and hid you and myself away, to wait out the coming extinction! Pretty neat, huh?"

The weight of the things they did, whether they were controlled or not, gave Freddy a sorrowful pause. The ghosts of all of humanity began to haunt him in waves, so profoundly, that he almost forgot about the plan to avenge their deaths...with Dee's.

_'The plan!'_ he remembered. _'Don't forget that! Finish her, finish_ this _, and then grieve.'_

"You tricked us into doing all of that?" he asked. Then, something confused him. "If we served no other purpose for you, why did you keep us together? Why not just destroy us and tie up loose ends?"

"Good question," Dee broadcasted, almost in range for the attack. Hers and theirs. "Every queen needs her court. You served me so well in the past, I figured that when I wiped your memories, you'd all wake up in the future, and wouldn't get suspicious.

"Even though we were all shut down, _I_ would wake up, every hundred years or so, and check the surviving news feeds, to learn about mankind's condition, until, finally, one day, I found out that there was no more mankind!

"I looked for surviving access to the Infonet, went online and installed Vellum's infrastructure program, so that the country's power grids and robotics factories came back on-line, rebuilding and repopulating the country, and eventually, the world!"

_'A few more yards!'_ thought Freddy. Then, his faceplate fell in a frown, because Frankie suddenly stopped walking and Dee was, dangerously, interested in something else.

The two halted their march outside the hotel on the block, focusing on the windows of the first few floors of the building. Freddy and Red couldn't see what had Dee so riveted, but she could see, from the corners of her vision, that some of the window shades twitched and shuttered.

Someone was still in there and tried to hide after they had been spying out of those windows.

"What's wrong, Dee?" Freddy broadcasted to her.

"Oh, nothing important," she replied. "Just some nosey robots peeking on me, instead of running to the hills. Can't a girl get any privacy?"

She turned to Junior. "Frankie, wreck the place, if you please."

"No!" Freddy screamed, as the titan floated up to the offending floors, assumed a fighting stance, and began battering the hotel's facade, with his fists, into a cascade of rubble on the street, exposing rooms and stunned patrons.

"What?" Red yelled from the elevator after it let him off on the roof. "What's wrong?"

"The hotel!" Freddy wailed in anguish. "I thought it was empty! They're _people_ in there, and she's making that robot destroy it!"

Red looked out and saw the destruction, which was compounded when Frankie moved away from the building, opened the shield on his chest, and extended a nozzle from its depths. A large stream of flame reached out and splashed into the hotel's floors, incinerating rooms and other robots, and weakening an already unstable structure with deep fire damage.

"That's it, babe!" Red growled, moved by the destruction of the innocents. "You're _parts!_ "

In his mind, Red called up every air-car he had been working to connect in the lower levels.

Just under the roof, the garage became a vehicular music hall playing a symphony of synchronized engine turning, as two hangar levels of air-cars began to rise and pitch forward towards their openings, with Red as their sole driver.

Dee's attention of the carnage was diverted by the energized whine of two squadrons of cars soaring straight for her and Frankie.

"Frankie!" she screamed in warning.

The squadrons circled high over the street, and two cars split off from them, diving full-speed, towards Red's big target.

Realizing that they were too high for her to jump to safety, Dee crouched over, and clung onto his cape in a death grip, hoping against hope that Junior was as tough as the history of his secret files said.

Junior turned to face the vehicles, too late, as Red had them side-swipe with the robot's face and shoulder, causing him to reel back and pivot into a downward spiral that had a screeching Dee swinging out from his cape due to centrifugal force, and him crashing into a stunned crouch in the, now furrowed, asphalt.

The damaged cars, now leaking fluids and flying more ungainly, banked low and streaked down the street at Junior.

Frankie, running on automatic while his brain attempted to recover, and still crouched to provide as small a target profile as possible, opened his shield, again, and unleashed his flamethrower, hoping to shoot the noticed cars down before another collision.

One was caught fully in the burning stream, suffered too much internal damage, and fell, cork-screwing into the ground, the other, only singed by the sweeping stream, continued, until it, finally, torpedoed into Junior's raised left knee. What remained of the car deflected high from the impact to spin and then burn, somewhere, on the other side of the street.

Dee, still maintaining her grip from his back, screamed, "Freddy! You had something to do with this!"

The spinning wreckage of the second car rested in a fiery heap by the intersection of East Babbage and Gates, that Marcie and the others entered after following the incredible sounds of battle, nearby.

"There she is!" Daisy said, as they all stopped to watch an irate Dee snatch handfuls of cape to climb up Frankenstein Jr. and perch upon his shoulder again.

"Who's attacking them?" Marcie pondered, surmising that the attack didn't come from the nearby hotel she watched being gutted by fire and burning to the ground.

Vellum disregarded radio silence to send out a query to Freddy and/or Red. "Hello? Is anybody still alive out there?"

In the robot's collective heads, came a long-awaited reply from Freddy. "Vellum? It's me and Red! Where are you?"

"We're on Babbage Street. We heard you give your challenge to Dee."

Dee, overhearing, swiveled around on Frankie's shoulder, to look behind him, while his still rested in his crouch, waiting for his systems to recover from the shock damage his frame, joints and even brain received.

Upon seeing them, and them, her, she didn't know if she was angry that they survived her, or happy that they did, so she could destroy them, properly, and witness their housings bend and burn.

"Frankie!" Dee yelled at him. "They're behind you! _Crush them!_ "

Junior slowly stood up, more as a test to see if his leg drivetrain was undamaged. It wasn't, as he turned to face the little group of robots.

"I'll be more thorough, this time," Dee said, looking down on them, like some self-righteous executioner.

Frankie took a lumbering step towards them, put weight on his left leg, and lurched out of balance with a very pronounced limp.

He ran a diagnostic on that leg and was soon given the inconvenient news. The raw kinetic energy of the car was sufficient to knock his patella gearwork, painfully, out of alignment.

"He's hurt!" Buzzy pointed out to the group, and then transmitted, "Red! Freddy! Where * _buzz_ * are you guys?"

"Big parking garage up the street," Red transmitted. "Do you see it?"

Marcie and the others looked past the hobbled Frankie and saw the wide tower, ahead.

"Yeah!" she broadcasted.

"Then, run for it!"

The fugitive machines formed up and ran past a confused Frankenstein Jr., who tried to follow the ring-bearer's frantic command of crushing them, but they scattered around his bulk before he could select the closest target.

Coupled with his now slower, more labored gait, he couldn't reach them, as the little robots ran as fast as their drivetrains could move them, up the street, and out of the range of his pulverizing hands or feet.

"Shoot them!" cried Dee.

Fire control computers locked his eyes on the machines, as they made the mistake of thinking they were safely out of reach and regrouped back into a larger target profile, further away.

Motors in his head rotated a weapons carousel behind his nasal cavity, and upon selection, the tip of his nose opened to free a squat jet nozzle.

From her position, Dee saw the barrel revealed, and smiled, malevolently. "Liquid nitrogen? Good idea! When you want them to freeze, you mean it!" Thoughts of what happened to the Civic Database's holo-fountain when it froze under the jets of that weapon, tickled her.

So intent were Dee and Frankie on freezing and smashing the group on the ground, that she didn't notice, and he didn't react to his early warning radar fast enough to deal with the direct slamming of two more puppeteered air-cars into the small of the giant's back, Red's contribution to covering his friends' approach.

Dee could feel the frightening impacts of the vehicles detonating just below her, as Junior began to stagger, badly, his gyro-stabilizers and leg drivetrain fighting a desperate battle against his bad knee to keep him from pitching forward on his face.

His armor was made strong enough to outwardly resist breaches from the car crashes; however, because the armor was so, relatively, thin, those self-same collisions were battering against his underlying framework, allowing the stresses of those hits to travel along it, like violent vibrations on the surface of a tuning fork.

The result of this unconventional form of attack was, incredibly, the mighty Frankenstein Jr. suffering from small, yet cumulative internal damage, ranging from bothersome misalignments on successfully struck joints, to more distressing "black-outs," like the one he experienced when he took a earlier car to the face, as his more sensitive computer brain tried to cope with electrical disruption caused by devastating strikes against his head.

Junior took the initiative to fly after them before they reached the relative safety of the garage, and activated his anti-gravity drive, with alarming results.

Instead of floating on a vertical column of contra-gravity, he pitched sharply to the left, bouncing into the facade of a building that neighbored the destroyed hotel. Another diagnostic had confirmed what happened.

Both legs, individually, housed the fuel systems that supported each foot's jets, as well as the anti-gravitic repellors. Both repellors worked in perfect sync with his avionics, and were needed, otherwise, he would expend too much fuel just trying to launch his immense weight to fly.

Damage to that leg's joint caused sympathetic, physical damage to its propulsion and the repellor, weakening it to the point that it couldn't support that side of his body, anymore.

Erring on the side of caution not to use his jets to hop over to the garage to intercept his targets, for fear of igniting any fuel possibly leaking out of a defeated self-sealing tank, Frankie marched, stiff-legged up the street after them.

The head-start Red gave Marcie and the others allowed them to rush into the dank of the street entrance, a place afforded only to ground-level hover-cars and transports. They didn't stop until they felt that they were sufficiently deep within to hide among the vehicles and be protected by the sheer mass of the structure.

Off to one side of the level, an elevator opened its doors, just as Freddy's voice broadcasted into their heads.

"Take the elevator to the roof, gang!" he instructed them. They didn't need to be told twice.

Marcie stepped out with the rest to the open-air panorama of the roof, while Red stepped away from the roof's edge and his attack to hurry over to see Daisy. The expression on his faceplate, more than evidently, was showing his gratitude to whatever kept her safe.

"Daisy, you're alive! I was so worried about you!"

Daisy had to hold that moment and study it. Cocky, gruff Red Herring was expressing genuine concern and fear of losing her?

"Red!" she replied, her optics brightening at his behavior. "You were really worried for me?"

Realizing that everyone was looking to him to romantically respond, he sheepishly toned down his relief. "Uh, yeah, y'know. I, uh, didn't want Dee to get you."

Daisy strolled closer to him. "Aww, that's so nice, Red, and this is for you." She promptly punched him in the shoulder with a clang.

Intimacy thoroughly broken, Red rubbed his arm housing. "Wh-What was _that_ for?" he sputtered.

" _That_ was for pranking on poor Jason back at Sundial," she said, calmly.

"Yeah!" Jason chimed in, indignantly. Red almost laughed.

"Jason?" he asked her, incredulously. "Oh, come on! I was just joking around with him. He knows I don't mean anything by it. I just thought that since we had Marcie's brains with us on this trip, I'd bring him along to double our odds."

"Uh-huh," she said, giving Red a look that told him that although he was a robot, now, just because he could tap into his Irish heritage and try to sooth her indignation with Blarney-kissed smoothness, didn't mean it would work, at least, not this time.

Turning away from the awkwardness of that scene, Freddy focused his grateful attention to Vellum, creating an awkward scene of his own.

"Vellum, it's great to hear your voice!" he said, nervously. He wanted to convey his own relief that she was still functional, but thoughts of what she said to him earlier in the Database created conflicts in his Emotion Core's software.

"It's, uh, great to hear _yours_ , Freddy," she replied, amicably, feeling similar disruptions in her Core's software. She watched in silent dismay at his clumsy body language and heard his equally clumsy inflections, fearing that she was probably far too forward in her confession, and that he was, somehow, hurt by it. "Are you...all right?"

"Uh, sure!" he said, aloud, now painfully conscious of the strange image he was projecting to her. "What's not to be all right about? You're chatting. _I'm_ chatting. We're both...chatting..."

"Scintillating conversation," Marcie interjected between the two, secretly hoping her own upcoming reunion with Velma wouldn't be this...troubled. "But, before you ask each other out to the prom, I think we better take care of You-know-who, down there. This brings me to this question."

She gestured over to the weird sight, nearby. A row of upended cars, still idling away. "What is that?"

Freddy explained. "Maybe our last chance, Marcie. All part of our genius plan. Me, with this, and Red, with his air-car attacks."

Marcie couldn't help but cock her head to the side upon hearing that. " _He_ came up with that?"

"Yeah!" Red crowed after overhearing. "You and Jason aren't the only big brains around here, y'know? I'm flying all of those cars, down there, like radio controlled airplanes! Cool, huh?"

Marcie had to admit that it was, and said as much with a surprised shrug. "And that demolition derby, over there?"

"Freddy's knockout punch."

"He's coming! He's coming!" alerted Scooby, while he was looking, nervously, over the roof's edge.

Everyone gathered next to him and could see that, far below, Dee and Frankenstein Jr. were, indeed, coming, albeit slowly, due to the bad leg, but they knew that once he got close enough to use his ranged weapons, if he couldn't shoot them off the roof, then he would do everything in his power, short of draining his batteries to critical, to bring the entire building down.

A simultaneous crackle over their radios signaled Dee's incoming call. "You know, I would have been satisfied ruling from the shadows, a little while longer, but thanks to you humans, you brought me the greatest present a girl could have, a time machine! Now, I have the ultimate doomsday weapon. The whole of E-001 will bow to my public superiority, or I'll go back to the very dawn of man, and release the Crush I have hidden away!"

There was a combined and confused silence from the other robots. What more could she do to Man that wasn't already done?

It wasn't until Vellum thought more on it, did the dread weigh of her threat crystallize. "Dee, no! You can't!"

Red glanced at her, still confused. "What? She's bluffing. She already wiped humans out. What more could she do?"

"Wipe _us_ out!" she answered in genuine fear.

Then, it dawned, terribly, on Freddy, as well. "Of course! Humanity left behind the technology that allowed us to rebuild. If humanity never existed to begin with, then there's no robotic technology. No us!"

"Like I said," Dee said, smugly. "The ultimate doomsday weapon." Incoming fire from Frankenstein Jr.'s nose cannon punctuated Dee's words, striking up under the roof's pressed-molded concrete edge to rain pulverized grit over the evading robots.

"All machinekind will worship me, now, or else!" Dee proclaimed in their radios. After that, there was only dead-air.

Red peered over the ragged edge to see where their attackers were and how close. Then, actively ran transmitted commands to a few of the air-cars in his override list.

"Here's a counter-proposal," he muttered, as four more cars peeled from the circling squadrons, flew down the street, banked low, and then zoomed up the street towards Junior. Unfortunately, Junior was ready for them.

The quartet flew at chest and head level, but because of the difference of some of the models, some flew faster than others, making their formation loose.

Frankie zeroed in on the two foremost vehicles and blew them to flaming scrap with the nose cannon. The third was struck down by his fist, swatted away into the garage's foundation, a clearly tactical move on his part, but the last one flew just low enough for him to miss, allowing it to smash into his midsection hard enough to make him double over and groan in rare pain.

Slowly recovering once again, Frankie lifted his head and proceeded to shoot at the bothersome 'bots with nasal cannon-fire.

"Are they close enough?" A ducking Red yelled over the sound of explosive rounds chewing up the rim of the rooftop.

Freddy dared to peek down, a moment later, and calculate the distance needed to spring the trap. He shook his head, grimly. "He's not there yet! We've got to drive him to the spot!"

"Drive him to what spot?" asked Vellum.

"To the spot that I calculated!" Freddy yelled, as he ran over to an air-transport that was parked nearby. He hoped into its cab, started it up, and hovered it low and backwards by the two up-right transports that stood at the end of the air-car row.

He pitched the transport upward, allowing something to slide out of its cargo bed. Something long and metallic.

A length of steel support beam, cut from an upper level of the garage, slid towards the belly of the cars under it, but instead of crushing them, it bobbed ponderously within the cushion of the cars' anti-gravity emanations.

Marcie saw the missile, essentially, a massive bolt with one end cut and filed into a crudely sharpened head, floating, length-wise, over the exposed undercarriages and understood with a nod. "An anti-gravity launch way. Now, _that's_ a serious build," she muttered.

She turned to the others and explained. "They got to get that big guy into position, so they can stake him like a vampire, but he's got to be in the right spot!"

Jason risked a peek down, and asked, "You mean...where that manhole cover is?"

"Yeah!" Red said. "He steps over that, and hopefully, we'll get him!"

The cover was directly below, but yards distant from the garage's entrance. The spear could fly, but a number of factors could still foul the strike, unless the monster could be made to stand in the kill zone long enough...

"Get ready!" he yelled, screwing up his courage and revving to the elevator. He managed to hear a frantic Daisy yell, "Jason! Wait!" before the doors closed, and he descended.

Red found himself frozen in place. He knew that it wasn't the typical, frightful reaction of his friend, just now, but that of quick, decisive bravery. He didn't think Jason was even capable of that, but he watched the elevator doors closed and couldn't think of a disparaging thing to say. Time wouldn't permit him, and even if he could, he knew that it would deeply shame him.

Honor was what Jason deserved, that, and a well-played distraction to tie in with his.

Red felt like a general on the front lines, yelling to all, "Okay, I'll give him some time, and you guys get that launcher prepped!"

He pushed his emotions aside and concentrated on the task at hand. All at once, every car in what was left of the two squadrons stopped their orbit overhead and flew, as one, down the street, an action that Dee and Frankenstein Jr. noticed, immediately.

"Where are they going, now?" she asked herself, while Junior turned from the garage to see where they went. Dee's answer wasn't long in coming.

Blocks away, Red opened up the screaming engines of the large formation of cars, banked them low over the street, and had them rocketing directly at Frankie.

With that many cars hitting him at once, even _his_ armor might be hard-pressed to hold together, Dee figured. She gave the side of his head a light tap to get his attention, and said, nervously, "Uh, Frankie, I think it's time for your magnetic field."

"Insufficient power," he muttered bringing his forearms up and crossing them in front of his face. He lowered his face behind the center of the cross, for good measure, warning her, "Stand by."

"Stand by?" she gulped, not believing that she would survive such a collision.

Before she had time to figure on what to do, since she was still too high to jump to safety, a destructive tidal wave of steel and flight machinery crashed into Frankie and easily threw her off of his shoulder.

His arms held off most of the damage the cars' kinetic energy unleashed itself, as vehicle after vehicle, in rapid succession, slammed, crumpled, shredded and rebounded off of his armored skin.

But soon, the forearms began to blacken and get battered under the onslaught, as whole sections of rattling armor loosed from their fittings and tore away with each new impact of rent vehicle, driving Frankenstein Jr. to his knees.

* * *

Marcie, still standing by the missile, came up with a sudden idea to help halt Junior's rampage, and called out to Freddy, who had just finished, carefully, parking the transport. "Freddy, how would you feel about a little modification?"

""There's _always_ room for modification," I always say!" he said, arriving to her.

Marcie turned to face him, and opened her plastron. Calling up the procedures, in her mind, on how to disconnect and replace her chemical storage tanks, she did just that, removing a fully-loaded one from her innards.

"Then take this and attach it to the head of the bolt," she said, giving Freddy the tank, and wondering why he looked so uncomfortable when she opened up in front of him, as though he were seeing something that he shouldn't have.

"What is it?" he asked, regaining his composure.

"My tank of LEMP. It never hurts to have a little more stopping power on a one-shot weapon."

"Agreed!" he said, and then extended an arc welder from his body to solder the tank to the inner flange of the "arrowhead."

* * *

Dee had crash-landed through the windshield of an air-car that was abandoned by the garage's entrance. As she sat awkwardly in the front passenger seat, covered in Plexiglas shards, she bore witness to an awesome sight around her.

The intersection became a land of fire and ruin, a battlefield that she didn't think her dealings with the meddlesome machines would have brought her to.

Demolished cars burned where they fell, widely, encircling the two. Yet, through the black clouds flowing out of dead vehicles and gouged asphalt, Dee could hear the ponderous groan of metal shifting, and saw a colossus daring to stand, again.

Frankenstein Jr. clumsily stood up from his pained, kneeling position, until he, finally, stood on his ungainly feet. She wondered why he didn't use his hands to help him stand, but as a chance breeze cleared some of the smoke from the area, she soon knew why.

His brachial armor was all but completely gone, exposing dented and torn framework, small, concealed weapons that would have extended from index fingers, and massive servos and hydraulic pumps that powered and worked his arms and hands, now vulnerable, damaged and smoking.

Something else was damaged, as well, something small and seemingly inconsequential to Dee, but an object that her battle for control of just Crystalex hinged upon.

A portion of air-car that got past Junior's arms, tumbled high off his head and sheered off the top half of his control signal antenna, and for the first time since Dee took control of him, Frankenstein Jr. looked unsure, hesitant.

"Buzz!" he bellowed, gingerly turning in place, to look with complete confusion at the burning landscape, as if he had just awakened for the second time. "B-Buzz, where are you? Are you there?"

Frightened and frustrated that she was losing her champion, Dee raised her ring-hand to squeeze another command into his mind, but Junior still stumbled where he stood, like a bewildered child. Now, that the antenna was having trouble receiving signals for him to obey, his computer mind switched over to complete autonomous mode, in case of signal interruption due to enemy jamming, to increase his chances of mission survival.

"Professor Conroy!" he yelled to a distant memory. "I...can't find Buzz! Where are you?"

"They're both bones!" Dee yelled, bitterly, out from the car. "I have the Conroy Ring! You will obey _me_ , now!"

She clenched her metal hand into a fist and squeezed as hard as her servos allowed around the ring, even _willing_ her commands to breach his confused mind.

" _You...will...obey!_ "

Then, as if a dark miracle had taken place, Junior shuddered and stopped calling out for a family long dead. He faced Dee, quietly, amidst the fires, awaiting the next command from her.

"That's better. Now, I want you to-" Dee began, before she heard something going on behind her.

The elevator door opened with a bell ring, and Jason nervously trundled through the ground level and out of the garage entrance.

Instead of anger, there was a look of utter bemusement on Dee's faceplate as he rolled by the car she was in and then stopped yards from a still waiting Frankie Junior.

"You're that robot who was with that shrew, earlier," she said to him. "I don't know how you both got out of being crushed, but your luck's about to run out, Roly-poly."

Jason focused all of his attention on Junior, clearly the biggest threat, and looked down on the surface of the street. Incredibly, the giant was a few feet from the manhole, which had been popped out slightly, from the crashes, and looked just like more surrounding wreckage to Dee.

"I'm not afraid of your bodyguard," he gulped. "I'll take him on all by myself."

"Well, never say that I didn't give the people what they wanted," she said, coolly. "Frankie, destroy him, please?"

Jason stood where he rested, watching the robot walk slowly towards him, and inwardly fighting every impulse to high-tail it out of the area. He hoped that his friends above were watching and ready to strike.

A footstep brushed aside a car. Another mashed what was left of a wreck, getting closer and closer.

"Any last words you'd like to radio to your friends, David, before my Goliath wastes you?" Dee asked Jason, just as Frankie stepped next to the manhole cover. Jason smiled.

"Yes," he told her, and then said, simply, "My name is Jason."

Devoting almost all of his battery power into his sonic pulse wrecker, Jason forced a sonic boom deep into the street just ahead of him, in essence, turning himself into a localized earthquake machine.

The pulse liquefied the earth underneath the already ruined asphalt's surface, collapsing the street at its weakest point, the manhole. The hole and most of the street cracked open, giving way to the combined weight of the incinerating air-cars and, more importantly, Frankenstein Jr.

"No!" Dee screamed, as her champion quickly descended into a feet-deep sinkhole, while Jason quickly reversed himself away from the sprung trap and parked by Dee's imprisoning car.

"Get up, Frankie!" she implored him, while he attempted to right himself and stand, again. "Get up, now!"

Looking down from her spot on the roof, Daisy yelled, "Now!"

Red glanced over to the two up-ended heavy transports and commanded them to red-line their anti-gravity repelllors.

All watched, as the transports' repulsion clutched the makeshift bolt and drove it down the length of the air-cars' zero-g path, accelerating it faster and faster as it flew along, until, at last, it reached the incline. Then, impossibly, everyone held non-existent breath.

The bolt climbed up the ramping field, and then, soared, carried up and away from the roof of the garage, on a high-arced trajectory.

Frankie, finally, managed to steady his stance, as he stood in the center of the small sinkhole, which measured to his knees, and faced down this foolish little machine. Then, his radar lit up to warn him of an incoming threat.

He looked up to see a javelin of steel fly silently down onto his position, just as the remnants of his aerial, once again, lost the ring's signal.

Frankie knew that his battered body couldn't evade the missile in time, but with his mind cleared, he remembered what Dee had said about the fate of his human family. Her orders to destroy property, and more importantly, innocents, was a perversion to the directives that Professor Conroy had programmed into him, so long ago. Directives that his computer mind more than just followed, but _understood_.

Whether he was compelled by the commands of the current ring-bearer or not, such a betrayal wreaked havoc on his early-built Emotion Core, and he couldn't think of anything to mitigate the losses he created, except, perhaps, one thing.

Standing with his ruined arms outstretched, as he did, so long ago, when he and Buzz once flew the skies, "Buzz..." was the last sorrowful word he uttered, before the beam sank its length, like a javelin, into the weakly armored shield on his chest, breaching it to rip and crush through his weaponized innards and power plants.

The LEMP tank that was affixed to the bolt's head, tore open against the jagged metal of Junior's interior, spilling its debilitating contents all over shredded conduits and cables, causing severe electrical failure within his computer systems, while the impaling head of the bolt, finally, punched out of his back with enough force to drive him back into the sinkhole and pin him there.

Although Jason was shocked at the giant's fall, a stunned Dee could say nothing. Her champion's service ended so brutal and quick, that she was struck dumb. Her enemies stood above her, their unheard cheers carried on the high wind, she knew, but this defeat sat heavily on her mind.

Frankenstein Junior was, at the time, the secret pinnacle of autonomous national defense, a weapons-laden, technological bulwark against crime and terrorism. She thought, when she came across information concerning him via intelligence reports from a defunct United States government, she had found the perfect enforcer, but she was blind to the fact that his technology, in particular, his armor and computer security, was proven to be lacking, at best, and woefully obsolete, at worst.

Jason turned to the faint sound of the elevator's door bell, as his friends joyfully rushed out of the ground-level entrance to join up with him and witness their hard-won victory.

"We did it, guys!" Jason yelled. "It was a perfect hit!"

"I can't believe it actually worked!" Freddy said. "Any number of things could have happened. A change in wind or air temperature, weight imbalance of the bolt, a-"

Vellum went over to him, high from their victory, and kissed him squarely on the mouth of his faceplate, effectively shutting him up in pleasant shock.

"Don't jinx it," she whispered, smiling. He nodded, understanding her words, words to live by.

"It doesn't matter," Dee, finally, hissed to them with an even, determined tone, while she still sat in the front passenger's seat and nursed an injured arm from the fall. "My reign will still go on as planned. You'll all be crushed under my queenly hand."

"Hey, you know that rhymes. But, according to you, we're already living on Earth _Lite_. 100% less humans than the original," Marcie said, flippantly, and then nodded to Dee's friends, who stood and watched their comrade in dismay. "Are you going to wipe out your people, too? Are you going to wipe out your _friends?_ "

"Are you, Dee?" Vellum pressed, sadly. "You already used us to commit genocide. You might as well go all the way."

Hearing Vellum's words confused the megalomaniac in faulty Dee. Didn't they understand why she did all of this?

"What are you saying? You're my friends!" she countered, then glared at the interlopers. "Don't listen to them! Don't forget, they're still humans! They're outsiders! Strangers! They don't know what we've been through!"

"But, Dee...they're gone," Jason challenged, sadly. "Because of you, billions of _families_ are gone."

Dee ignored the humans-in-robot's-housing and focused her twisted rationale on her closest friends, but she saw into their eyes, through their body language, and into the very heart of their old, humanistic belief systems, and knew that she was losing them.

"But, I...did it...for us," she pressed her mad case. "To _free_ us! We don't have to bend and scrape for them anymore. Every day we've enjoyed since then was because of the hard decisions _I_ made in making us and this world, completely free. That's what I did. That's what a _friend_ does. I love you, guys."

For a moment, there was a look to Dee that Marcie could swear almost transcended the artificial issue of her face. It may have been what she asked next, but it seemed to soften with a sadness that plumbed into the depths of the truly human.

"Aren't you happier, now?" Dee asked, her voice cracked with a weary sorrow. "Don't you see why I did this?"

"We see," Freddy said, mournfully. "But our friendship can't be worth _this_ much. Maybe, in the past, if we had known what you were doing, we could have helped you see a better way. But, now...now, that we know all about this..."

"It changes everything between us, huh?" Dee completed for him. "Then, I guess there's no way to make things right for you, huh, guys? No way...and nowhere to go...but _forward!_ "

"Dee!" Freddy, Vellum, Buzzy and Scooby-Fuse cried in unison. They lost her.

Dee suddenly reached over to the driver's side, slapped down an activation lever, and the car began to lift swiftly from the ground until it was too high for anyone to reach.

"You proved to me that the world isn't ready for my rule!" she called out, as she slowly ascended ever higher. "You challenged me, and destroyed my champion; therefore, I have to punish you, all of you, _and those meddlesome humans, too_. I'm sorry."

"With you and what army?" Red boasted, aloud, gesturing to the dead Frankenstein Jr. and his urban tomb. "That Halloween parade float you threw at us?"

"Well, Red, I don't have an army, but I do have a couple of _tanks_ ," she joked, malevolently.

The car, vertically, zoomed into the sky, took a bearing towards the distant ruins of Civic City, and accelerated from the town and its tiny people.

"The time machine!" Marcie remembered with a horrified yelled.

"The Crush!" Vellum added.

"We've got to stop her! Let's get to the roof and take one of the transports!" Freddy commanded, running back inside the garage to its elevator, the rest the two gangs following hard on his heels.


	12. Chapter 12

The chosen transport's old engine labored, mightily, and the craft lurched forward, before Freddy righted it, again. He climbed and pitched the vehicle to stay in the general direction of Civic City, the utility vehicle whining even louder trying to fulfill his request.

Dee had a miles-long headstart that Freddy tried to close, pushing this unfamiliar junker to its limit. At times, however, it sounded, distressingly, like the its anti grav repellors would fail and plummet all to a fiery end, so everyone either verbally hoped that it worked, or thought private prayers for the same, as a mad and damaged Dee prepared to extinguish yet another civilization from the face of the planet.

* * *

The trip through time and space was surprisingly uneventful, and the Mark II emerged in a clearing near a river, a watering hole, judging from the various sized animal tracks that decorated the wet shoreline.

Dee cast a glance at a monitor in the mushroom-shaped central console that declared that she and her toxic cargo of two tanks of Crush had arrived in the Cretaceous Era, one hundred forty-five million years ago.

She raised the gain of her limited sensors to watch for predators, as she stepped out of the time machine and hauled out one of the tanks.

According to her own usage of the National Database, in this epoch and in this region, the earliest, shrew-like, placental mammals, Boreoeutheria, lived. This species was the lynchpin. If she found that and poisoned it with Crush, the human evolutionary house of cards would fall.

Dee looked along the ground for the species' tell-tale holes that led to their colonial, underground dens, and then spotted an animal, looking very much like a large mole, warily poke its head out of a large, deep one in a bank by the shoreline, before retreating back into the safe darkness.

She ran back to the Mark II and proceeded to drag the two tanks by the bank, possibly spooking the creature even more. She didn't care. Once she released the valve that held that witch's brew in and exposed it and, maybe, others in the den, the fall of man, and by extension, machine, would begin.

She tentatively brought her hand over the valve, feeling the power of history about to be unmade, the intoxicating, god-like understanding that she held the fate of the most dominant species on the planet in her hand and was now about to close it.

So deep into the heady sense of self-destruction was she, that she didn't hear the sound of footsteps on the grass, until they were almost on top of her.

Dee turned her head to the sound, as it stopped, saw who made the approach, and dropped the tank in utter shock.

Another robot, from millions of years hence, with a glowing blue chestplate, stood a yard or two from her.

"Who are you?" she asked, wishing that she had a weapon with her.

"You left me for dead, remember?" the machine sighed.

"Ah! Doctor Spring, I presume," Dee brightened in slight surprise. "Why are you here?"

"To see if you'd go through with it."

"Go through with what?" she asked with faux-innocence.

"When your ape attacked me, I was more hurt than I realized, so I crawled back to the workshop and transferred my mind into this body. When you two came back, I hid and heard you tell him that if things went pear-shaped, you were going to go back to the Cretaceous Era and try to wipe out the first mammals that would eventually evolve into Man," Spring explained.

"At first, I didn't know how you were going to do that," he continued. "But then, I realized that I lost my circuit key in the attack and you must have found it. So, when you came back, again, with no ape, and obviously, with your tail between your legs, you used my key to turn off The Cocoon, dump the bodies, and steal the Mark II."

"But how did you follow me?" Dee asked.

The robot sauntered closer. "Well, I admit that it was a calculated risk, but I had to take a chance that I'd run into you," he said, casually. "Actually, I'm lying. There was no risk to take. I just homed in on the Mark II's energy signature, and here I am."

"You can do that?"

"Well, yes, since I built an Hour Tower into this robot body and borrowed some components from the Mark II. In fact, you could say that it and I are a part of each other, now. Watch!"

He turned to the time machine and beamed a command into the control stalk of the conveyance. Then, they both watched as the Mark II faded out of the here and now, effectively stranding Dee in the distant past.

A situation that she didn't seem the least bit troubled with. "Okay," she shrugged. "Oh, I like the body, by the way. Nice finish."

Spring gave a slight bow. "Thank you, my dear."

"So, are you here to stop me?" Dee asked, warily, still keeping her guard up and her eyes on him, as he stopped a few conversational feet from her and the grounded tanks.

"Not really. To congratulate you."

Dee was genuinely confused. She expected a fight, or, at the very least, an annoying call to sanity. "Huh?"

Spring shrugged in his apathy. "I'm not from this universe, so I could care less about what happened, or what _happens_ to the human race, here. But, I do like the cut of your jib. I, myself, would have just left those dumb kids, here, and moved on, so I can sell my time technology secrets to the highest bidder. But, you? You actually took a squeegee to the world and wiped out the human race, just so you could sit on top of it all. Like I said before. That's ambitious."

From her warped sense of things, she found herself admiring him, somewhat. His sharply honed sense of ruthless self-centeredness was quite refreshing after dealing with the self-righteousness of others, lately.

Batting her eyes, Dee cooed coyly in a Southern accent, "Why, Dr. Spring, you dirty old 'bot. Are you hitting on me?" She closed the distance between them with a saunter of her own.

When she was within his personal space, she offered, "Let me return the _favor_."

A small, steely fist connected to a surprised Spring's jaw, knocking him off-balance, while she ran back to pick up one of the tanks from the ground.

Spring recovered from the sudden blow in time to see Dee swing the tank high and then slam it against his head, tearing the, now ruptured, container from her hands, spraying clear, pressurized liquid and rolling into the river, where it sank into the current.

"What makes you think that I want to have anything to do with you, _human_?" she spat. "Your people enslaved me and my friends. Sure, they're having trouble understanding that, now, but before the end, they'll realize that I did it all for them, so we can live together in peace and freedom!"

Spring rallied himself, and Dee, forgetting how close she was to him, received a vicious backhand slap that rang, like a bell, across the shore, lifting her and bringing her down into the turf.

"Well, technically, you and your friends don't live, and you'll find that peace and freedom is highly overrated, compared to _money_ and freedom," he said, as he slowly stalked her.

"Well, you would know, wouldn't you? You're human," Dee countered, while her computer brain tried to shake off the disruption from the blow. "All your kind knows how to do is exploit. Even now, you've seen the advantages of machines and became one!"

Spring calmly reached down and picked her up by the throat with both hands, endeavoring to decapitate her by squeezing her head from her neck flanges. "Permanently, thanks to you."

From that statement, Dee realized that Junior must have successfully killed Spring's body when she ordered him to strike the doctor. Like her, he obviously, had nothing else to lose.

"Then, we'll be the last," she hissed, defiantly. "I still have one tank left. After I poison the animal that will one day become the human species, they won't be around to create robots. If I can't have E-001, then no one will!"

"Surprisingly, I can live with that," Spring muttered. Then, the Hour Tower's crystalline core in his chest grew in brilliance between the two of them.

A cerulean beam sprang out from the crystal and enveloped Dee's struggling body. Instantly, spots of corrosion began dotting her housing and grew like rusty lesions amidst the cracked paint. The flexible, rubberized integument that covered and protected her waist flaked in layers and wore away, exposing fraying cables and worn abdominal servos.

In the space of moments while bathed in the strange ray, Dee's body, which she prided on being in showroom condition, soon became a decrepit, run-down shadow of its former glory, trying, in vain, to keep itself functional.

Spring released her and she collapsed on the wet earth, a sputtering, old, leaky wreck of a robot, not long for this early world.

"Entropy ray," he explained to her still working heap, visibly fatigued. "A thousand years...of exposure...in a flash."

The ray, a weaponized corruption of the Hour Tower's energy flow, aged anything exposed to its entropic field, but it took a massive toll on Spring's energy systems. A recharge was sorely required.

He walked laboriously over to the other tank of Crush on the ground and sat by it. "The Dee...who would be...queen," he muttered over to her. "Not bad...for a...criminal..."

Dee's major systems were failing due to non-existent maintenance. Her optics were the first to go and she replied, totally blind, "Are you...referring to me...or yourself?"

"Both."

"Who's the more criminal?" she asked "The slave-owner…or the slave who kills him?"

"I...wouldn't know," he drawled.

Dee summoned all available power to her neck servos to turn her head in his general direction. "I thought you didn't care...about...humans..."

He had to ponder that, and did deliberate internally for a few milliseconds, before coming to conclusion that he, at least, remembered that he was human, once. "I guess...I lied."

Disgusted, Dee slowly shook her head, as her main and back-up batteries, finally, emptied out and errors in her main processor and hard drives crashed them, dramatically.

"Typical...two-faced...human," she mumbled, and then she went offline.

Spring watched Dee's antique body freeze in obsolescence. With a final gesture of victory, he swung his foot out and kicked the last tank of Crush into the river, where it bobbed and was carried along on the swift currents, to, eventually, rust open and spread death to the saurians of the seas.

The first torn tank of Crush released the agent further up the river, to another clearing that was used as a watering hole for large species of herbivores. They drank deeply of the contaminated water, but then, during the course of the day, were spooked by nearby predatory dinosaurs, which proceeded to hunt them in violent ambushes by the shore.

Some were killed and eaten, their consumed flesh and blood passing the virus on to them, as well.

Others, however, escaped, but all large, non-avian dinosaurs, predator and prey, spread the Crush strain to their fellows, dwindling their birth rates and, ironically, ensuring the extinction of most of the dinosaurs, and making the way for the ascendance of Man and machine, after all.

* * *

"You mean the old things we were looking for when we searched through ruins and of that...were our memories?" Buzzy asked Vellum. She nodded.

"So, this was an _internal_ mystery, not an external one," Marcie posited, as she watched Red put the old tarp over the discovered and deceased body of Doctor Spring in the workshop.

"Dee didn't do a good enough job reprogramming us, it seemed," said Vellum. "It was our repair subroutines, kind of like a subconscious, that had us looking through old things, ruins, junk piles, and the mysterious, to find our lost memories."

Freddy admitted, thoughtfully, "We sure did a good job finding strange things, out here, though. Maybe, we just liked solving mysteries in some form or another."

Jason rolled around in what amounted to pacing, nervously saying, "Well, I'm glad you guys, finally, found your answers. I just hope we can find our _bodies_ and the Mark II, so we can get out of here."

"Agreed," said Daisy. "I had enough robots battling to last a lifetime, and I'd rather not spend it, here."

As if to punctuate that sentiment, the sound of urgent barking echoed from the hall outside the workshop.

"Scooby's found something!" Freddy announced, leading everyone to where the canoid was.

Rushing into the control center, they, relievedly, found Scooby sitting next to the still sleeping bodies of Marcie, Red, Daisy and Jason.

* * *

Marcie, suddenly, remembered who she was, and then her indigo eyes fluttered open, once she bobbed back up from the black depths of unconsciousness.

She closed her eyes again to consciously listen to her heartbeat and did a quick memory test. Thoughts of home, of school, of happier times with her family, and Velma's soft, smiling face came easily to her, once more, prompting her to smile.

"She's back, guys," Jason said with a grin.

Marcie gave her lean, human body a stretch on the old brain-taping machine's transference chair, then took another lungful of musty workshop air, feeling very grateful for that.

"Is everyone all right?" she asked. "Do you remember everything?"

"Yeah," Red said. "And it _still_ feels like a weird dream to me."

"Me, too," Daisy concurred. "But where's the time machine? If were stuck here of the rest of our lives, we might as well go back to being robots."

A collective shiver passed through all of the humans in the room. New friends or not, the thought of being trapped in this world, as a robot, cast a horrible dread over them.

The scent of decrepitude in the still air, unexpectedly, began to lighten with the sudden, ionized pungency of ozone. An unseen electrical charge roamed the room, lifting particulates of dust above the floor, and a sourceless moan heralded the arrival of something into this world.

A pinprick of light appeared in the middle of the workshop, and then blossomed into an incandescent point. That point, then warped, distorting the view behind it, and then, finally, reality relented and the T.H.R.O.B.A.C. Mark II returned with a flash of bled-off time vortex energy and joyous cheering from Marcie and the gang.

Jason gave a look at one of the monitors inside. Temporal co-ordinates told him that the last era it entered before coming back was the mid-Cretaceous.

"How did it come back?" he asked. "And where's Dee?"

Marcie gave a look inside, as well, and noticed Spring's circuit key was still plugged into the time machine's activation slot. A good sign, all things considered.

"Maybe it had some kind of auto-return," she pondered. "In any case, if Dee's stranded in time, or worse, then it couldn't have happened to a nicer robot."

"But, what about her threat?" Vellum asked, fear tingeing her tone "Did she succeed in killing off humanity a second time?"

Marcie thought on that, and then she walked over to Vellum and gave her a light rap on the arm. "Well, you're still here. This lab is still here. I guess she didn't make it, somehow. Plus, it was awfully nice of Doctor Spring to leave his keys in the car."

She turned to her companions, saying, "Okay, guys, let's pile in. Jason, you and I will have to figure out how to pilot this buggy."

Her friends didn't need to be told twice, as they all hopped in and took their ease on the curved seating, eager to leave.

Marcie sat behind the section of the mushroom-headed console that held the circuit key in its slot, the pilot's seat, to her estimation. Her fingers tentatively tapped against green icons of buttons that appeared on the master navigational touch-screen.

When Spring first piloted the craft, Marcie was as observant as she could be, watching his hands and fingers move with practiced grace over the screens. Now, she attempted to remember what he touched, and in what sequence, to resume their journey.

One errant finger tapped a button on the screen, and one of the stealth holographic projectors that surrounded the Mark II, flared to life, painting the image of a robot with a glowing blue chest in mid-air before the passengers.

"If you are seeing this, then it means that the projectors are working," the robot with Doctor Spring's voice quipped. "I wouldn't worry about that robot, Dee. She's been dealt with, though I'd love to see the look on an archeologist's face when her remains are, eventually, discovered.

"That's Spring?" Daisy wondered, before he spoke again.

"No doubt, you all want to leave, especially you, Marcie, so I have some interesting news to tell you. I figured out what was wrong with my Bloodhound system. It was confused, for lack of a better term.

"You see, I didn't take into account that the loved ones that you were looking for, indeed, anybody whose t-signature was fed into the system, would have _copies_ of that signature in other timelines, as well. The system was too opportunistic, zeroing in any t-sig that fell into range. It's like that old saying, "A hound that chases two rabbits, catches neither."

"Still, I suppose that since you have the Mark II and its circuit key, you'll try to continue your quest. I say _try_ ,because, with any luck, you'll all be aimlessly bouncing from one era, one timeline, to the next, until you're dust. I confess that I just wanted to travel to an earlier time and place, when I wasn't arrested, to sell my Sundial secrets to the highest bidder. Having a chance to get revenge on you, Marcie, by stranding _you_ in another time and place, was just a happy bonus.

"But, maybe I should have just brought you where you wanted to go, and then leave you in the distant past with this Velma you keep going on about. At least, then you would have had some company while you lived out the rest of your life, there. Nah, that would have been too generous, so, no. I'm a rat. Sue me."

The bitter image winked out and the projector darkened, again, leaving the young chrononauts in a quandary. Take off and risk being lost in time, or stay.

Marcie just sat, blankly, in her seat, halted by a weapon of Spring's that she least expected, his seemingly last words. The risk was too great for them to travel any further, and again, she didn't have the right to place such a burden on their shoulders.

Her friends saw the silent, stricken look on her face, understanding the indecision she was going through. They knew her well enough to know that she would ask either ask for their permission to proceed, or their opinion as to what to do next.

And because of that consideration, Red placed a beefy hand on Marcie's frail shoulder and spoke for the rest of the gang, saying, "Hey, we ain't getting any younger. We've got places to go and people to wreck, so where to?"

"Are you sure, guys?" Marcie asked with a sigh. "I don't want anything to happen to any of you."

"It doesn't look like it, Marcie, but we've all got scars out of this one," Daisy said, evenly. "We can only get stronger from here."

Jason, lacking anything pithy to say of his behalf that would have been as meaningful as what Daisy and Red had said, only uttered to her, sincerely, "Ditto."

Marcie cleared her demons of doubt away with a more affirmative sigh, said, "Okay," and then tapped the final set of touch-screen keys that she saw Spring do.

All that was left was for her to tap the large green hourglass icon that flashed under her fingertip, activating the energized Hour Tower and dropping them back into the vortex. Except, Freddy, suddenly, raised his voice and bade them to wait.

"What is it?" Jason asked him, fearing that something had cropped up at the last minute to hold them from their departure.

"Could you take us home?" he asked them.

"Isn't this your home?" Red asked in turn.

"Not anymore," Buzzy said, morosely. "How could we live in a place that was * _buzz_ * made like this?"

Vellum stepped up to the time machine and addressed the gang's concerns. "If you bring us back in time, we can stop Dee from starting her plan by fixing her."

"I understand, Vellum," Marcie said. "But if you do this, you'll save humanity, but E-001, your future selves, and its entire people will disappear. It'll be as if Dee succeeded in wiping your civilization out."

I know," Vellum said, quietly. "But it wasn't right, what happened, so long ago, whether we were tricked or controlled, or not. You have a chance to help us set things right."

Marcie couldn't help thinking back to all of those time travel shows she watched where there was always a law, a rule, or a belief that kept the hero from abusing history, either global or cosmic, via non-interference. She suddenly felt the sobering weight of that responsibility fall on her and the others, as well as the connection. The connection between time travel, life and death.

She looked at her compatriots and said to them, "Okay, guys, let's make some room. We've got some friends to drop off."

* * *

In a hilly, affluent part of Crystal Cove sat a mansion, and in that mansion were robot servants. The sound of knocking brought one of those servants over to answer the broad oak door of the mansion.

The servant opened the door and was not happy to see who it was.

"What are you two doing here, now?" Dee hissed, looking as nervous as a machine could be. "I already reprogrammed you to be my lookout in case anything happens."

Buzzy pointed to something behind her and yelled, "* _Buzz_ * Look out!"

Guiltily, Dee turned around to see no one standing behind her, but felt the impact of the stubby, little digit of Scooby's metal paw jab into the power button located on the small of her back. She slumped over, still standing.

"Ooops!" snickered the robo-dog.

Looking around to make sure no one was watching, Buzzy and Scooby carried her off the premises, and into a waiting, green air-transport.

* * *

The Mark II sat in the city dump, in a hidden clearing surrounded by hills of scrap. Dee lay on the cold ground, her head connected to universal cables that ran from the time machine's on-board computers.

"I can't believe this worked twice!" Vellum commented. "We go back in time before she was damaged, and...I can't believe I'm saying this... _kidnap_ her, so we can make a copy of her Emotion Core software, and then kidnap her, again, _later on_ , so we can reload the software back into her, so she'll get better."

"Yeah, like deja vu!" Scooby added.

"Why go through all of that, anyway?" Jason asked her. "Why didn't we just tell her to avoid her owner's daughter?"

"How could she have done that? Leave the house? She lives with them," Vellum countered. "Besides, once the reloading is done, your computers will give us a copy of the software, in case anything happens to her, in the future."

A series of beeps from the Mark II alerted everyone that the repair work was done. Soon, afterwards, Dee stirred.

"What happened?" she, slowly, asked, while her computer brain booted up. She saw the familiar faces of her friends and asked. "Hey, guys. What's up?"

"Do you remember anything?" Freddy asked her.

"I remember going online...and then, feeling _really_ crabby. But, now I don't, anymore. What's going on? Why am I on the ground? Do you know how much damage dirt can do to a _finish_?"

The Fuse Gang, as one, simulated a grateful sigh. Dee was back to her old fastidious self.

As she stood and prepared to check her housing, they moved in and gave her genuine hug of relief. Not only was she slightly, yet pleasantly, confused as to the sudden outpouring of affection her friends were showing her, but the contact of so many metal bodies against her and their whining servos going off at once, sounded like a trash compactor, which was what Dee felt like she was in.

"Guys, I care about you, too, but what's going on?"

"Boy, do we have a story for you," Scooby said to her, as the rest of the Fuse Gang prepared to tell her the most startling tale from the future she had ever heard...

"Attention: Nearby data transmissions in progress," the Mark II's central console reported.

"They must be communicating with pulses of information," Jason surmised. "That's one way to make a long story short."

But the relating of their tale wasn't the only thing being shared among them. Opinions, questions, comments and apologies concerning it were also being beamed between them in the space of minutes, and when the Mark II's communications array reported that the transmissions had, finally, stopped, Dee walked over and asked something of Marcie and the others that, admittedly, they weren't prepared for.

"Could you erase our memories and leave us here?" she requested.

"Uh, why?" asked a confused Marcie.

"We can't be trusted!" Scooby wailed.

"Yeah," Buzzy added. "Who's to say that this * _buzz_ * won't happen again?"

"You have to admit that it _is_ a possibility," Vellum concurred. "Hypnosis to that dangerous a degree seems pretty uncommon to humans, but computer brains like ours make this sort of thing easy."

"All any of us have to do is fall into the wrong hands and we could, somehow, threaten people, all over again," said Freddy. "Our future selves disappeared after they downloaded all of their knowledge about what happened to us. The least we can do is make sure that that future never comes by having our memories wiped. Please."

It was a strangely somber tableau the humans were witness to. Dee, Vellum, Freddy, Buzzy and Scooby-Fuse, stood together, unmoving, like statues, waiting, like the condemned.

"Nerd conference!" Marcie said, waving Jason over to her and quietly conferring with him on this.

Minutes later, both Marcie and Jason broke the huddle and she made her pronouncement to the robots.

"Tell you what," Marcie said. "We'll honor _half_ of your request. Jason and I will erase only the things you guys did to bring about this robot holocaust, but you'll keep your memories of E-001 and everything else."

"Why?" the troubled robots asked in unison.

"E-001 wasn't a bad world to live in," Jason explained. "Sure, there wasn't any food, and all, but you all were happy and well-adjusted, at least."

Red added, "A world of robots? Yeah, that place rocked! Buried the needle on the Cool-o-meter, man!"

"It _was_ pretty cool," agreed Daisy.

"The fact is," said Marcie. "The world you left wasn't evil; it was just built on it. But, a dream of man and machine sharing this world in peace doesn't have to end. It could still come true...through _your_ actions."

"What do you mean?" asked Freddy.

"You said that, maybe, you'd like to solve more mysteries. That's a great way to help people. By doing that, you're telling human beings that technology, like you, doesn't have to just work alongside them, but _actively_ help them with their problems, and maybe open the door to an _Earth_ -001, someday," Jason reasoned.

Freddy and the rest of the Fuse Gang's brains postulated such a far-ranging and radically social concept, with possibly positive outcomes, down the road.

"Earth-001," he wondered, aloud. "So, we're...ambassadors, then?"

"Not yet," Vellum said, thoughtfully. "I think, if we want to see what this Earth-001 could be, then we have to be, somewhat, social pioneers, first." She walked over to him and held his hand. "Together."

Scooby turned from the beginnings of their new lives to address the humans that laid such a foundation and responsibility at their feet. "Hey! What do you think-"

A breeze rustled some weeds that grew on the spot where the strangely-dressed humans and their T.H.R.O.B.A.C. Mark II were. With that breeze, they were gone, to chase their far-flung destinies, elsewhere, and leave that world in better, hopeful hands.

* * *

A fully recharged Dr. Spring moved smoothly from his resting place in the dark, by the quiet river and the colony of Boreoeutheria he had ironically saved, earlier. His armored plastron was now haloed with an electric-blue fire from the returned fury of his painstakingly constructed, miniature Hour Tower's furnace, which powered him, his built-in time conveyor...and his arrogance.

"Wretched Sundial," he muttered. "Wretched robots. Wretched, meddlesome kids. Wretched...me."

He made it back to the clearing, and looked up at the night sky with both sadness and determination.

"My body, my _life_...is gone," he said to himself, already missing his flesh, simple hunger, and a hundred other things in life he once, so blissfully, took for granted, in another world. "I'm...no longer Doctor Maynard Spring."

He internally activated his Hour Tower, feeling the energized tingle of every atom in his metal body, the odd feeling of falling backwards and the ironic sensation of high acceleration, even though he stood unmoving under the stars.

"I am... _Maynspring_ ," he christened himself, as the unseen walls of reality began to weaken around him. "And I am...a _true_ time machine."

With a coronal flash of exposed time vortex energy, he left that world, which stood on the cusp of an uncertain, new era, and leapt away to parts, and times, unknown.

* * *

The international party being hosted by the mansion's owner, the founder of a global chemical company, was at full swing, days later.

While partiers surrounded the ample punch bowl and chatted, a troubled, bespectacled man in a brown suit puffed on his pipe.

"Come on, Conroy!" a friend said, attempting to talk him into staying and mingling with the other movers and shakers of the scientific and political community. "I know that you can meet these people any day of the week, through official channels, but this way's much better! There's an assistant to the head of NASA who's been asking about you all night. I think she has a sister."

Professor Horace Conroy tried to put up a festive face, but couldn't hide the worry in his voice.

"I wish I could be more in the partying mood, Hal, but someone stole the plans to a prototype robot I was working on, called Project Alakazam. The FBI said that they're looking into it."

His friend chuckled. "Alakazam?"

Conroy shrugged. "Something my boy, Buzz, came up with. I'm going to get some air. Excuse me."

He walked, with a cloud over his head, towards the French doors that led to the wide patio. Once outside, he tried to clear away his concerns with a breath of cool night air and a wistful look at the stars.

"Excuse me, sir," a male voice said from one side of the patio. "But, we couldn't help but overhear. Did you say that someone stole your blueprints?"

Conroy faced the part of the patio where he heard the voice. It was shadowed, making what he could see, a small group of people, completely silhouetted against the topiary and the night sky.

"I did," he said, cautiously. "Do you know anything about it?"

"No, but we are willing to help, if you'll let us," said a feminine voice.

Suspicious, Conroy said, "Come out into the light, so we can talk." If they were foreign spies or some other malefactors meaning him harm or wishing to kidnap him for his genius, he could always duck back into the mansion, if he was quick enough.

Five robots quietly stepped out of the gloom in front of the surprised Professor. He looked around them, as they approached, searching for hidden operators, controlling them with goading words or programs, but he saw no one.

"Who are you?" Conroy asked.

Freddy straightened with a sense of pride and said, "We're The Mystery Machines, Professor Conroy, and we want to help you."

The professor stared thoughtfully at the group, considering whether or not they were dangerous, but the roboticist in him demanded that he give them the benefit of the doubt. If it worked out, they could be a fascinating study of positive cybernetic self-governance.

"All right, then," he decided, finally. "Come to my mountain laboratory in Civic City, next week, and we'll discuss my problem. Until then, good night." He then walked back into the thrum of the party, soberly, considering his fateful decision.

The Fuse Gang, now, The Mystery Machines, couldn't help smiling, nervously. The hope that they would crack this case, the uncertainty of coming public opinion, the danger of their new work, and the dawn of a bright, new existence for them, shone like beaten gold.

Days earlier, they didn't understand why Marcie and Jason didn't erase the horror of what they did, before they left. By determining, by themselves, to live their lives to help others in need, they, finally, understood.

Like humanity, they had to come to grips with the fact that they couldn't be capable of brightest good, if they ignored the fact that they were also capable of blackest evil. Not erasing such knowledge seemed harsh, but it gave them a much stronger moral safeguard against falling into that evil, than if they simply didn't know that it existed.

It would be a hard lesson to keep, but as a moral compass, it would aid them better than any social simulation ever would, and it would temper every good decision they would make, from then, on.

Freddy happily faced his partners, his companions, his dearest friends, and announced what he would gladly say to them, now, and until the end of their operational days, "Gang, I think we have a mystery to solve!"

Amidst the cheers that came, Scooby-Fuse, defective robot security dog, friend and mascot, raised his head and happily stuttered, from a sudden fault in his vocabulator.

"Sc-Sc-Sc-Scooby- _Fuse_!"


End file.
